The Data Hunt
It shouldn't be this hard to get my own f*cking data.
When I started looking I found that my data was scattered everywhere.
Health metrics were locked in Apple Health, purchased books spread across Amazon and Apple, and watch history fragmented across eight streaming services. Once you cancel a service your watch history is gone until you pay again (if you are lucky).
Apple does not provide an easy way to export health data so I use an app called HealthFit as a bridge with Google Sheets export. A Google Script extracts CSVs at 5am daily, Google Drive syncs them to my Mac, and a bash script copies them to my vault at 6am via an Apple Shortcut. Every morning I wake up with yesterday's health and workout data ready to import with zero effort.
I run using only my Apple Watch with Nike Run Club, which syncs to Apple Health. If I let Nike push directly to Apple Health then share with TrainingPeaks, the runs lose key data because multiple laps become a single lap so I cannot see splits and the map disappears. Apple Fitness shows both but does not pass them on to third-party apps. My fix was to disconnect Nike and TrainingPeaks from Apple Health entirely and use HealthFit as the bridge to send data to both.
Amazon has my entire purchase history for Kindle and physical books so getting it should be easy. Instead you request order history and wait months for an email, confirm within 5 days, wait for another email, then download within 90 days only to find the data is barely usable with no product type, just product name and date.
I was frustrated and impatient so I built and deployed my own Chrome extension while waiting for the first email from Amazon. It scrapes purchase history and exports to CSV. I still had to remove non-books manually but at least I had my data. I built similar extensions for Prime and Netflix that capture viewing history directly to my vault.
Emby was different because it does not expose when you watched something even though it knows. The database lives on my NAS at a path that was not obvious to find. I copied it to my Mac, opened it with sqlite, found the dates buried in the activity log and recovered almost 5 years of my watch history. It shouldn't be this hard, but it is.
My data belongs to me, and your data belongs to you. More data can reveal patterns that would otherwise remain hidden from view.
Getting it back often requires detective work, custom tools, and digging into databases you were never meant to see. For my next post in this series I will cover how I designed the automation to bring it all together.
If you have fought to get your own data back, I would love to hear about it. What was the hardest piece to export?
That's Eliza. She runs the house and is tired of waiting too.
Series: A journaling system for lazy people like me (2/4)
Read more: Personal Data Hub