How to get your habit data out of any tracker

Two years of daily logs is worth something. It is the only record of what you actually did, and unlike a streak number it does not reset. Losing it because an app shut down, or because the export button was behind a subscription you had cancelled, is a genuinely annoying way to lose it.

Most iOS trackers offer one of four things. A real CSV with one row per entry, which is the good case. A JSON blob, which is fine and sometimes richer. A PDF or an image, which is a picture of your data rather than your data. Or nothing at all, which is more common than you would hope, especially in apps whose entire value proposition is a social feed.

If your app is in the last two categories there is still a way out, and it is less painful than it sounds: screenshot the history, hand the images to a language model with a strict output schema, and get structured rows back. It is not perfect and you have to spot check it, but it beats retyping eighteen months by hand.

This guide covers what each format contains, how to check an app’s export before you commit to it, the prompt shape that produces clean JSON from screenshots, and how to reshape any of these into the two column date and value format most trackers and tools accept.

Outline

Status: outline. The introduction above is finished copy. Everything below is the section plan for the full draft, targeted at about 1 600 words.

1. The four export formats. CSV, JSON, PDF and nothing, ranked by what you can do next.
2. Checking before you commit. Exporting on day two, not on the day you leave.
3. The canonical shape. Date, habit, value, one row per entry, ISO dates.
4. Rescuing data from screenshots. The extraction prompt, the output schema, and the spot checks.
5. Reshaping for import. Wide to long, and the three fields most importers require.
6. Where to keep the archive. A plain file, versioned, and why that beats another app.