Exporting from your old app

Where the export lives in Subsurface, MacDive, Shearwater, Garmin, Suunto and the rest.

Export your logbook from your old app as a file, and that file is all we need. Once you have it, see "Bringing dives from another app" for where to hand it over.

Worth knowing before you export: where your old app offers a choice of formats, take UDDF or the app's own native file over a plain summary. Those carry a depth reading per moment, so your dives arrive with the profile you actually swam instead of a standard illustration. See "Is this depth graph my dive?".

Subsurface

Subsurface → File → Export, open the General Export tab, choose UDDF and confirm. Subsurface's own .ssrf file works just as well if that's what you already have on disk, and either one brings your profiles with it.

Note: exporting from the File menu takes your whole logbook. If you want only some of it, select those dives first and export from the right-click menu instead.

MacDive

Look for the export in MacDive and choose UDDF, or its own XML if that is offered. One file carries the whole logbook, so there's nothing to do dive by dive.

Shearwater Cloud

Look for the export and choose UDDF, which is one of several it offers. You can also send us its dive log database, the .db file, exactly as it sits on your computer.

Note: don't send the ZIP that "export account" produces. That one is a support bundle for Shearwater, and we can't read inside a zip.

Note: the depth readings inside a .db sit in a form we can't read yet, so those dives arrive with the standard illustration. A format that carries readings, UDDF among them, keeps your curve.

Garmin Connect

Use Garmin Connect on a computer. The phone app doesn't export files at all, which is where most people get stuck.

For a few dives: open the dive, then use the menu in the top right and choose Export Original. That's the dive's own FIT file, profile and all. It arrives as a zip, so open it and send us the FIT file inside.

For a whole logbook: ask Garmin for everything at once, from Export Your Data in your Garmin account settings. They email an archive, which can take a day or two. It saves clicking through dives one at a time.

Suunto

Start by connecting the account rather than exporting. Once Suunto is linked, every new dive comes across on its own, with nothing to download and nothing to upload. See "Connecting your Suunto account".

That covers new dives only, so the dives already sitting in your Suunto account still need a file like anyone else's. A FIT file works if you can get one per dive, and an older DM4 or DM5 dive database on a computer needs no export at all: we read that file as it is.

Note: dives arriving over the connection come as summaries rather than readings, so they draw the standard illustration. If you want the real curve on a particular dive and can get a FIT file for it, upload that too.

Diviac

Export from the web version at logbook.diviac.com rather than the phone app. It hands you a spreadsheet, Excel or CSV, which we read: see the spreadsheet notes below for the columns worth having in it.

A spreadsheet you keep yourself

Save it as CSV. Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets all offer it, and one dive per row with your column names in the first row is the whole recipe.

Don't rename your columns to match ours. We read your file's own vocabulary, so Max Depth or Bottom time is fine as long as a person could tell what the column holds.

Worth having a column for:

  • the date you dived
  • where you dived, by name
  • max depth
  • how long you were down

A dive with no date, or with nowhere named, waits for you to fill that in before it can join your logbook. Having both in the file is what saves you the typing later.

Any other app

Send us the file anyway, and we mean that. We teach the importer new formats as real files turn up, so an export we've never seen is genuinely useful to us. Get in touch with the original file and tell us which app it came from.

Note: if your export arrives as a zip, open it first and send the file inside. We read dive files, not the boxes they travel in.