About the survival of our Data ( when Apps die )

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Posted by Amontillado
Jun 14, 2025 at 02:01 PM

The new Obsidian Bases feature might hold some promise. Right now, you can have as many views of your data as you want, provided all you want are table views.

Imagine adding Canvas views to Bases. Documents that appear on the fly would either appear at the bottom of the Canvas or maybe in a list of notes not yet positioned.

I remain a die-hard Devonthink enthusiast, though. This morning I need to correlate, link, and organize about 50 PDF documents. I thought about doing that in Obsidian with Bases but I need to tie tags and properties to the PDFs. I don’t think Obsidian can do that with a non-Markdown file.

Posted by Amontillado
Jun 15, 2025 at 12:54 PM

Well, there’s an obvious answer. Create a Markdown file for each PDF and embed the PDF in the Markdown.

Or, as I like to say, three lines of Python for a boatload of PDFs.

Posted by eastgate
Jun 15, 2025 at 10:56 PM

I believe this issue is far less dire than it was a generation ago.

Take Tinderbox (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/), which I design. It’s huge, opinionated, and exotic. Its documents are XML files. If Tinderbox disappeared, you could extract all your data with modest difficulty — difficulty that is decreasing every year. (You could get much of your data out by opening your Tinderbox documents in BBEdit!)

Same thing for Scrivener, Pages, Keynote: if you need to, you can get your data out. If LOTS of people need to (for moderate quantities of “lots”) you can make it easy to get your data out.

In addition, a generation ago emulation was pretty much a pipe dream. Now, it’s fine and even ubiquitous.

Now, this doesn’t mean you’re entirely safe from annoyance and inconvenience if your favorite application vanishes. It might take some work. But this is no longer something to inspire 7 pages of worry in a week.

Posted by Amontillado
Jun 16, 2025 at 03:31 AM

Let’s hope Tinderbox lasts a long, long time.

One of the things your app has going for it is a remarkable user community, intellectual, polite, and very helpful. I’ve never made it to one of your meetups, but I often catch them after the fact on Youtube. Great food for thought and a fine showcase for your products.

Much respect for your work.

Looks like there are some cool new features, too. I re-upped my license and plan to dive back in.

All the best!

eastgate wrote:
I believe this issue is far less dire than it was a generation ago.
> >Take Tinderbox (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/), which I design.
>It’s huge, opinionated, and exotic. Its documents are XML files.
>If Tinderbox disappeared, you could extract all your data with modest
>difficulty — difficulty that is decreasing every year. (You could
>get much of your data out by opening your Tinderbox documents in
>BBEdit!)
> >Same thing for Scrivener, Pages, Keynote: if you need to, you can get
>your data out. If LOTS of people need to (for moderate quantities of
>“lots”) you can make it easy to get your data out.
> >In addition, a generation ago emulation was pretty much a pipe dream.
>Now, it’s fine and even ubiquitous.
> >Now, this doesn’t mean you’re entirely safe from annoyance
>and inconvenience if your favorite application vanishes. It might take
>some work. But this is no longer something to inspire 7 pages of worry
>in a week.

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jun 21, 2025 at 01:17 PM

So I encountered a real world example of how work can be stranded in an app. I work for a publisher. We are updating our web store to show which of our other titles are related to each title. You, know, “If you like this book, you may be interested in these.” Anyway, I chose to do this in Workflowy, because after I imported the list of our titles, I could easily nest the related titles under each book. That worked fine. But then, when I wanted to export the data and import it in a usable way into Excel, I just couldn’t. I dropped the list into Dynalist, and had the same problem. I dropped it into OmniOutliner. No help. Ultimately, I put it into Craft, an app I already use to share documents with my colleagues, and I think this will work.

I am not looking for a solution here—some of you might have helped me figure it out, but that’s not my question. My question is, which app do you trust the most with keeping your information and gives you confidence you can get it out and into other apps? I know this is a fluid question, which depends on the type of information being stored (narrative text vs. outlines vs. structured data), so I don’t expect an exact answer. I’m just trying to learn generally which apps this group is confident in.

Thanks in advance for those daring to venture into this conundrum.

Steve Z.

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