About the survival of our Data ( when Apps die )

Posted by Skywatcher
Jun 8, 2025 at 06:08 PM

I’d like to talk about a subject that has become quite important to me and gather your opinions on it.

Last year, it was announced that iThoughts was being terminated and abandoned by its developer. https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/10522/0/ithoughts-discontinued
There was no explanation apart from the fact that the company was closing.

This came as a bit of a shock to me then. It was an app that I relied a lot on, I spent years making dozens of elaborate maps about projects, plans, guides , etc.
I considered it to be by far the best mindmap software in the Apple environment, having almost perfectly identical versions on Mac/iPad/iPhone, and it seemed to be quite successful commercially as well. It also had a Windows version that was released more recently.

The idea that it could just disappear like that , one morning, without any warnings never even crossed my mind.
I found myself scrambling to find an alternative, testing pretty much every mindmap available on the market. The OMPL export from iThoughts never got properly imported into any other app. I settled on MindNode which did the best job at importing the iThoughts maps, but I still had to spend days reconstructing the maps properly, copying by hand some of the stuff that just didn’t get imported , relinking nodes that didn’t relink properly , etc. It was an infuriating process.

That experience really did make me think about what might happen to the massive amount of data I have in various applications , especially Curio, Tinderbox, Devonthink and Obsidian.
I hope all these developers have a long productive life, but we have to be prepared to the fact that one day we might just wake up and find that the developer of an app we deeply rely on has decided to become a reclusive monk living alone on top of a mountain with a goat and a plant of tomatoes. Or any other scenario that just leads to the company and the application being completely abandoned.

The best-case scenario would be that it would be sold to another developer, or the developer(s) have a plan that if they abandon the app, it would be released as open-source so that other volunteer developers would keep it running for at least enough time for people to figure out how to get their data into another software.
But I’m afraid it’s an unlikely scenario. It will probably just be abandoned , then at one point it wouldn’t even be downloadable.

I have no idea how I would get some of the massive documents I built over years ( decades even in the case of Tinderbox/Curio/Devonthink ) into other compatible apps. It’s just not going to happen. Maybe the Curio docs could be exported as limited PDFs then reconstructed ( over weeks ? months?) into something like OneNote . I also have no idea how I can rebuild Tinderbox maps anywhere else…

Only Obsidian seems enough bullet-proof in case of extinction. Any of the apps ( and a lot of others ) I mentioned could become extinct at any moment. This made me really reconsider the use of these types of apps. Their idiosyncrasies are exactly what make them unique and powerful, yet they are also their Achilles heel, because the way the data is presented and structured makes it nearly impossible to be reconstructed somewhere else, no matter what export format they use ( HTML, OPML, JSON, etc.).

So what to do ? Use only apps from big companies like Apple or Microsoft , that are unlikely to disappear in the short/medium term ? That would be a shame, as the most creative apps come from small indie devs. Or use only apps that are built as much as possible on standards like Markdown ( Obsidian ). Or … just live dangerously…

What are your thoughts on this ?