I’ve been using Mac Journal for twenty years, since it was a paid app and right now I wish it still were. I’ve lost access to the bulk of my journal entires after MacJournal apparently corrupted its database. As a free app of course there is no support and my email to the developer has gone unanswered. Does anyone know of a forum of MacJournal users or are than any power users here that can suggest some trouble shooting procedures? Rounding up the usual suspects by deleting the various System Library files has not met with success. The app happily writes new entries and oddly enough hasn’t lost track of my 2003 entires but otherwise the journal entires are “empty”.
I have MacJournal backups going back a very long time in ~/Library/Application
Support/MacJournal/Backups, which were automatically put there by MacJournal. If you happened to have the Backup setting configured in MJ, you might have luck opening of the most recent .mjdoc files in that folder.
FWIW, when I updated to the last (perhaps final) version of MJ in May 2022 (v7.3.1) the update launched with a blank new file. I had to navigate with File > Open into the most recent backup folder, open the most recent file there (from the day before I upgraded), and save that into a new destination. All my notes were present and accounted for at that time. It was a bit of a shock to see the blank workspace, but recovering was simple.
That is terrible, I feel for you! I don’t have a solution but this is one reason why many in this forum use apps like Obsidian for journaling. The journal entries are plain text and on their computers and easily backed up. There is, of course, a big fan base for Day One on this forum, but I suspect that it is theoretically susceptible to the same danger.
I recommend a further step if you sync your plain text notes/journals between devices.
My note taking app stores my notes as plain text on my Mac but uses CloudKit to sync between the Mac and my iPhone. If something were to go wrong on one device, bad data could be synced to the other device where it would make its way onto my backups.
I don’t expect this problem to occur but just to be on the safe side, everyday after reviewing my Daily Note from the day before, I append it to the text file I’ve been accumulating for the current year using BBEdit (a highly reliable editor).
And I also run Time Machine backups to a wirelessly connected server, Carbon Copy Cloner backups to external drives I store in a fire resistant safe, and offsite Arq backups to their cloud storage.
I too have many auto generated back up copies including a few back ups to the back ups that I zipped and put on another drive but the app is unable to read any of them with different results. This makes me think that some sort of index has been corrupted, the sort of thing that might be in a prefs file but I have yet to find anything in the Library folder or elsewhere that improves things. Luckily the actual entires can be read with a text editor as .rtf files when extracted individually but the file names are all nonsense text strings so sorting out twenty years of files will be difficult to say the least.
I’ve had memory problems for years so the journals became a memory supplement so short answer that seems like a reasonable amount of precautions to me. I have a local drive, iCloud and my MacBook internal drive but no fireproof safe. Kinda hoping iCloud stands in for that. Didn’t help though since it seems its independent of which back up file I open.
