How to move your seizure history to a new app
People switch seizure diaries for ordinary reasons. The app closed. It stopped being updated. It never had medication reminders. A new phone, a new country, a caregiver who needs access. Whatever the reason, the same worry comes up: what happens to the years already logged?
It is a fair worry. Your seizure history is not a collection of notes, it is the evidence your treatment decisions are made from. Whether a medication worked, whether the dose is right, whether seizures cluster at a time of day: all of it is answered by comparing now with before. Lose the before and those questions get harder for years, not weeks.
Here is how to move without losing much, in the order that actually matters.
A disclosure, stated plainly: this guide is published by the makers of Epilepsy Mate. The steps below apply to any diary you are moving to, including ones that are not ours.
Export before you cancel anything
This is the one step with an order that cannot be reversed. Get your data out while the old account still works, before you delete it, before the subscription lapses, before you wipe the old phone.
Look in the old app’s settings for anything called export, download, backup, share, or report. You are usually offered one of three things:
- CSV or a spreadsheet. The best outcome. Every entry stays separate, with its date, time and fields intact, so it can be sorted, charted, and read by a person or a program later.
- PDF or a printed report. Fine for the doctor and fine for keeping, but it is a picture of your data rather than the data. You will not be able to sort or recalculate it.
- Nothing at all. More common than it should be. Screenshots are then a legitimate answer: month view, medication list, any charts, and the settings screen showing your medications and doses.
Take whatever is on offer, even if it looks untidy. An awkward file you can still open in five years beats a beautiful app you have been locked out of.
Keep the export like a medical record
Save the file somewhere that survives a lost phone. Email it to yourself, put it in cloud storage, keep a copy on a computer. If you are the caregiver, make sure one other person knows it exists and where.
Name it so it is findable without opening it: something like seizure-diary-2019-to-2026-export.csv is enough. And keep it even after you have moved, because the new app almost certainly will not hold everything the old one did.
What usually survives the move, and what does not
Expect this to be partial. It is normal, and knowing it in advance stops you spending an evening trying to force a perfect transfer.
Usually survives: dates, times, durations, seizure types, medication names and doses, and anything else that lived in a structured field. These are the parts a report is built from, and they are also the parts that transfer cleanly between formats.
Usually does not: free-text notes, photos and videos, attachments, custom fields you invented yourself, and anything the old app calculated rather than stored, such as streaks or trend charts. Also, quietly, the times themselves can shift if the two apps disagree about time zones. If the dates in your export look an hour or a day out, that is usually why.
Do not retype years of entries
The instinct is to re-enter everything so the new app looks complete. Resist it, for two reasons.
The first is practical: it takes hours, and most people abandon it half done, which produces a record that looks continuous but is only partly real.
The second matters more. An entry typed today from a spreadsheet row is not the same as an entry logged at the time, and once they sit side by side nobody can tell which is which. If a neurologist later asks how confident you are in a particular month, you will not be able to say. Keep the old export as the old record and let the new diary start clean.
If you do want some history inside the new app, carry a summary rather than a transcript: one entry noting the date range, the approximate seizure frequency, and the medications you were on, clearly marked as imported from a previous diary.
Mark the changeover date
Make one entry on your first day in the new app that records three things: the date the old diary ends, where the export file is kept, and whether anything was lost in the move.
That note does a specific job. Records that begin abruptly look, to anyone reading them later, like a period with no seizures. One line prevents a gap in your data being mistaken for a gap in your epilepsy, and it will still make sense to you in two years when you have forgotten the details.
If the old app is already gone
Sometimes there is nothing to export because the service has already closed or the phone is long gone. That is recoverable, just not fully.
Write down what you actually know: roughly which years, roughly how often, which medications and when they changed. Check what other people have without realizing it, since old appointment letters, clinic summaries, prescription histories and pharmacy records all reconstruct medication timelines surprisingly well. A partner or parent may remember specific events you do not.
Then label the whole thing as recollection rather than record, and start the real diary from today. Two months of accurate entries are worth more to a neurologist than two years of confident guesswork, because they know how to weigh the first and cannot weigh the second at all.
Choose the next one so you do not do this again
Two questions, asked before you commit, will spare you this whole article next time.
Can I get my data out? Look for the export function now, while you are still choosing, not on the day you need it. If it is not there or not obvious, that is your answer about how the ending will go.
Is the app still being maintained? Every app store shows a last-updated date. An app that has not been touched in several years can still be installed today and still break after your next phone update.
Our comparison of the best epilepsy apps in 2026 profiles the realistic options against these criteria, with the same disclosure as above. If you are coming from the Epilepsy Foundation’s retired diary specifically, choosing a replacement covers that case directly.
Keep logging while you move
The gap that hurts is not the one in the export, it is the one in the weeks you spent deciding. Paper is a perfectly good bridge: our free printable seizure diary templates are there for exactly this, and a note on your phone works too. Transfer it into the new app once you have chosen.
And if seizures become more frequent, longer, or different while you are between diaries, tell your medical team rather than waiting for the record to look tidy. A seizure lasting more than 5 minutes, or repeated seizures without full recovery in between, is an emergency: call emergency services immediately.