sync to new phone

TomHerrick

My previous phone (Pixel 5a running the latest Android I think) got bricked and I'm trying to restore my diary temporarily onto an old phone (Pixel 4a running Android v13) using Cloud Sync. I was using Cloud Sync to Google Drive on my previous phone, so I set up Diarium (v3.1.23) on the 4a and pointed Cloud Sync to the same Google Drive login and folder. It said it was importing but now that it's finished, the calendar and timeline don't show any entries. If I go to 'Diary Statistics' it tells me there are 246 entries, 138 photos, etc, which sounds about right, but I can't see the actually entries anywhere. What am I missing?

Diarium version: v3.1.23
OS + version: Android v13

timo

If the statistics say there are 246 entries, they must be somewhere. Did you click on the search page? They should at least show up immediately there

TomHerrick

timo - You're right, they do show up on the Search page. That's a big relief. Weird that they still don't show up on the Calendar or Timeline, but now that I look around some more, I do see them when I look via Map, Attachments, Search, Tags and On This Day. Calendar and Timeline seem to be the only ones missing them. I can probably live without that, but if you have ideas about how to resolve it, please let me know.

Thanks for the quick and helpful reply.

timo

Perhaps you are just scrolled to the wrong year on calendar + timeline?

TomHerrick

I discovered what was going on here. Apparently the cloud sync had stopped working in mid-December 2024. So the import was importing data up until then, but I wasn't scrolling far enough back in the calendar to see it. I'm bummed that I lost the data from mid-December 2024 to early-April 2025, but I have been doing monthly Google Doc exports, so it's not a total loss. I guess if I'm really motivated I can go back and copy/paste from the google docs into the past dates, but that's going to be a lot of work.

Not sure why the cloud sync stopped then.

timo

Sorry that happened. Diarium shouldn't just stop syncing quietly and also shows a sync indicator on the sync button that you can check.
Maybe the sync stopped because it reprompted for authentication and you dismissed the dialog? Or the trial version ended which will disable the sync?

TomHerrick

timo Yeah, it might have been a permission issue that I just didn't notice. Thankfully, I think I have almost all the data in my google doc exports and I'm going to start using the desktop version to reenter the data more efficiently than I could on my phone, so that should have the added benefit of serving as an extra backup and making it more obvious in the future if syncing has stopped.

I'm also considering having chatgpt help me extract the data from the google docs into some format that I can import. Do you have a recommendation of import format?

TomHerrick

ChatGPT seems pretty confident it can produce a zip file with a CSV containing date, content, tags, location and images (references to relative paths) and include that in a zip file with the images. It then tells me to go to Settings -> Import to import the file, but no such option exists. Closest I can find is Settings -> Import Diary, but that seems to want a .diary file that'll replace the current diary. I suspect this is a case of ChatGPT being confidently incorrect, as it is somewhat prone to be.

Is there a way to do incremental imports (like a month at a time) into Diarium on either MacOS or Android?

timo

You can ask ChatGPT to create a csv file in the form of the Daylio backup file and use that using the "migrate from other app" button

TomHerrick

I'm not having much luck with that. Seems like ChatGPT is generating a different format than what the Migrate From Daylio function wants. I'm getting a "System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection. (Parameter 'index')" which I think suggests the Diarium function is expecting more columns than what I have in the CSV.

I currently have datetime,mood,activities,note. Previously I had the date broken out into separate fields, but then Diarium's migrate function was complaining that "2025 isn't a valid datetime".

Can you let me know what the CSV should look like?

timo

You can download the Daylio app, do an export and see what the format looks like

TomHerrick

I decided to just restore the data manually. The hardest part is finding and re-attaching the images, and it didn't look like the daylio import was going to support that anyway.

A suggestion for a future feature would be to support partial imports in a simple, documented format (csv or json) and be sure to include support for image attachments.

Thanks for the responsiveness to all my questions here! It's great that you provide such active support.