Exporting goshuin records: how a backup, a CSV and a PDF differ

This article covers one thing: what each of the three exported files — a backup, a CSV and a PDF — holds, and what each one can and cannot be used for. Moving records to a new phone, tidying columns in a spreadsheet, and laying out the pages you print are not covered here.

What is the difference between an export and a backup?

A backup is a file for putting your records back into the app they came from; a CSV or PDF export is a file for a person to read. Both take your records out of the app as a file, so they look like the same thing, but they are made for opposite purposes.

A backup is made for after a phone change, a breakage or a loss, so that the records come back exactly as they were. The photos, the order of books and pages, and the places you pinned on a map all have to return together. Which is usually why it is not in a form a person can open and read.

An export for reading is made for looking back without opening the app, counting in a spreadsheet, putting it on paper, or showing someone. Anyone can open it, but it was never meant to go back into the app.

What a list of your records lets you look back at, and which fields deserve to be columns, is a separate piece: how to decide the columns from the way you will look back. This article picks up where that list leaves the app as a file.

A backup, a CSV and a PDF side by side

The photos are in the backup and the PDF, sorting and counting belong to the CSV, and only the backup goes straight back into the app it came from. The table covers the differences that hold for these formats generally.

A CSV is nothing more than text separated by commas. There is no place in it for a photo at all, so even where a tool can take a CSV in, only the text comes back. A PDF is a copy of a printed page, and the text on it was never meant to be read back as records.

A backup alone tells you nothing about what is in it

An encrypted backup gives you no way to see with your own eyes what it holds, short of importing it back into the app it came from. Open it in another app and no meaningful text appears.

Where that bites is when the app it belongs to is no longer usable. If you set out a few years from now to move to some other way of keeping records, ten backup files in your hands will not let you copy out a single name of a shrine or temple, or a single visit date. All a backup promises is that the same app can restore it.

The second thing is that you cannot see from outside whether a backup actually works. Whether the file arrived intact, and whether the records you meant to put in it are all there, is not knowable until you actually restore it.

An export you can read cannot put anything back

However many CSVs and PDFs you have, none of them can return your records to their original shape once the device is gone. A readable copy survives; the records themselves do not.

Take it concretely. An iPhone holding 300 goshuin breaks, and all that is left in your hands is three PDFs, one per book. You can look back through them. But to search by the name of a shrine or temple on the new phone, to add your next visit, or to correct a visit date, you are entering 300 records again. And if you have deleted the original photos from your photo library, you begin by pulling the photos back out of the PDF pages one at a time.

Had the CSV been the only survivor, the names and the visit dates would all be there as text, and not one photo would.

The only key to a backup is the passphrase

A backup encrypted with a passphrase can be read by nobody without it — not the person who made it, not whoever made the tool — and if you forget it, that file will not give the records back. How to keep the passphrase, and how to check a restore by counting entries, are in putting the exported backup off the device and testing it on the new phone.

Which one do you make, and when?

Make a backup to be ready for a phone change or a breakage; make a CSV or a PDF when you want to look back, count, or put it on paper. Working back from the purpose leaves nothing to puzzle over.

If you are going to open the CSV in a spreadsheet and sort it, read why sorting on the Japanese-era column breaks the order, and how to get back to book and page order first. If the PDF is going onto paper, settling which fields go on the page, and whether to group by book or by year first saves you reprints. What to check before you hand a file to someone is in how to handle notes, where a photo was taken, and the names of the people you went with.

The copy you can still read on the day you stop using the app is the readable export. Keep one of those and one backup for the day you lose the device, and neither event leaves you stuck.

What this app does

In Goshuin Ledger, the app we make, a backup can be created without a purchase, and CSV and PDF export come with the one-time Ledger Full. Here is what each of the three holds, plainly.

The backup (no purchase needed). One .goshuin file with your records and photos encrypted together under a passphrase. Exporting it and restoring it on a new phone is written out in how a phone change goes with this app's backup.

CSV (Ledger Full). "Export CSV" in Settings turns every record into a single file. The first row holds the column names, each goshuin takes one row from the second row on, and there are ten columns: book, page, visit date (Western calendar), visit date (Japanese era), name of the shrine or temple, its reading, your note, photo file, type, and style. The header row itself is written in Japanese.

• The Western-calendar visit date comes out as 2019-05-01; the Japanese-era one as the era name, year, month and day in Japanese characters. Rows run oldest visit first, and records with no visit date come last.
• The book column holds the name you gave that book, and the page column holds the page number. For a goshuin that is not in a book, both are empty.
• The photo file column holds only the file name the app uses to point at a photo (several photos are separated by a space). The photo itself is not in there.
• The type column holds one of goshuin, goshuinjo (castle seal), tetsuin (railway seal) or gosenin (ship seal), and the style column holds either written in the book or pre-written; like the header row, both are written in Japanese. For a record whose style was never set, the style column is empty.
• There is no location column.
• The file is in a format Excel opens without garbled characters (UTF-8 with a BOM). A cell beginning with =, - or a similar character can be run as a formula by a spreadsheet, so in that case it is exported with a single ' added at the front. A note you started with - gets that ' too.
• The file name carries the date you exported on (for example goshuin-2026-09-17.csv).

PDF (Ledger Full). "Export PDF" in Settings makes one file per book. If you have goshuin that are not in a book, they become one more file.

• It opens with the name of the app, a heading for the name of the book, and a heading for each page number, and under those sit each goshuin's photo, its visit date in both the Japanese era and the Western calendar, the name of the shrine or temple, and your note. A type other than goshuin, such as a goshuinjo (castle seal), and any style you have set appear beside the visit date.
• The photos are copies scaled to roughly 800px on the long edge.
• The date the PDF was made is at the end.
• Locations, and the reading of the name, are not on it.
• Your notes appear as they are. There is no setting that leaves the notes out, so read what they say before you hand the file to anyone.

Photos you have imported but not yet added to a book are not goshuin records yet, so they are in none of the three. Add them to a book before you export.

The things it does not do, also plainly. There is no way to open a .goshuin backup outside the app and read it. You cannot feed a CSV or a PDF back in to restore records either. And nothing is synced between devices.

Your first book needs no purchase and records as many entries as you like. What Ledger Full opens up is listed in the pricing section. For the price, check what the App Store shows.