Most meditation apps will give you your session history as a file, usually a CSV: a plain spreadsheet with one row per session. Look under Settings or Account for Export, Export log or Download my data. On iPhone, many apps also write each session to Apple Health, which can export everything it holds in one go, and if an app has no export at all, its privacy policy names an address where you can ask for a copy of your data. The file normally holds the date, the start time and the length of each session, sometimes the name of the practice or the recording, and rarely how the session felt. Once you have it, you can keep it as a spreadsheet of your own or bring it into a journal that reads it, so years of practice are not left behind in an app you no longer open.
Why bother
A log of sessions is the one record of your practice that exists outside your memory. It knows that you meditated most mornings in 2023, that the long sessions came in the autumn, and that you stopped for six weeks and came back. None of that lives in the app's recordings or its features; it lives in the log. Apps change hands, subscriptions lapse and phones get replaced, and a log that was never exported goes with them. Exporting takes a few minutes once, and the history is yours after that whatever you decide to do next.
Where to look, in order
- The app's own settings. Open Settings or Account and look for Export, Export log, Download my data or Data. It is often a level or two down, under Privacy, Data or Advanced, and the file usually arrives by email or lands in your downloads.
- Insight Timer keeps it under Settings → Features & Preferences → Session → Export log, which gives you a CSV of every session with its start time, length, preset and activity. If the menus have moved, search the app's help for "export sessions".
- The app's help pages. If you cannot find a button, search the help center for "export" or "download my data". Many apps have an export that is only mentioned there.
- Apple Health, on iPhone. Many meditation apps write each session to Health as mindful minutes. In the Health app, tap your picture, then Export All Health Data. You get a zip holding one large file with everything Health knows, your sessions among it. It is meant for software more than for people, so this is the route to take when you have somewhere to send it, not one to read on a Sunday afternoon. On Android, start with the app's own export.
- A privacy request. Privacy laws in several US states, and in many countries, give you the right to ask a company for a copy of the data it holds about you. The app's privacy policy names the address to write to, and the law gives the company a set time to answer, usually a month or so. Say plainly what you want: a copy of your session history in a machine-readable file such as CSV.
What the export usually holds
Open the file once before you trust it. A CSV opens in any spreadsheet app, and the first few rows tell you most of what you need to know.
- A date and a start time. Check whether the time is yours or the app's: some exports write every time in UTC, so a 7 AM session may show up as noon. A time zone in the heading or an offset after the time tells you.
- A length. Minutes, or hours, minutes and seconds (00:20:00), or sometimes seconds alone, where 1200 means twenty minutes. Mixed lengths are the most common reason an import looks wrong.
- Sometimes a practice or a name. The activity (meditation, breathing, yoga), the recording you played, or the name of a preset timer. This is what lets you compare practices later, so it is worth keeping.
- Rarely how it went. Few apps ask, and fewer export the answer. If yours did, that column is the most valuable one in the file.
- Never the recordings themselves. A guided session's audio belongs to its teacher and stays in the app. Your record of having done it is what comes with you.
Three good things to do with it
Keep a spreadsheet of your own. One sheet, one row per session, with a date, a length and a practice. Add a column for how it went and a column for a line of notes, and fill them in from today. A formula gives you minutes a month. It is free, it is readable in twenty years, and nothing about it depends on a company staying in business.
Bring it into a journal that reads the file. A meditation journal with an import can take the CSV as it is, so its patterns have history to work from on day one instead of starting from zero. Before you trust one, check three things: that it shows you a preview before anything is saved, that importing the same file twice does not add every session twice, and that an import can be undone if the columns were read wrong.
Simply keep a copy. There is nothing wrong with saving the file next to your other records and starting fresh somewhere else. The point of exporting is that the choice stays yours.
What no export can give you
An export tells you when you meditated and for how long. It cannot tell you which sessions were the good ones, what you noticed, or what was going on in your life that week. Those are the things that make a record worth reading back, and they are also the things memory lets go of first. Whatever you do with the file, the useful habit from here on is a line after each session and a word or two for how it went. In a few months the numbers you exported will have company.
Where Solvance fits
Solvance reads an Insight Timer export as it is, and any other spreadsheet of sessions: it guesses which column holds the date, the length and the practice, shows you a preview before anything is saved, never adds the same session twice, and lets you undo an import in one step (Settings → Data & Account → Import your history). Imported sessions go to the Journal like any other, and Insights can start on when and how long you meditate while you add how it went. The door works both ways: everything in your account can be exported as one file, your sessions as a CSV, and your journal as Markdown, whenever you like.