Run the exit test

A tool does not need to disappear to trap you. It only needs to make leaving painful.

When choosing where to keep something important, I ask a simple question:

If this service disappeared tomorrow, how difficult would it be to continue without it?

The answer depends on the data.

Losing a calendar would be annoying, but most events could be recreated. Losing a Spotify playlist would be frustrating, but life would continue. Losing years of photos, journals, or personal notes would be different. Some things cannot be reconstructed.

That leads to one rule:

The more personal or irreplaceable the data, the easier it should be to move elsewhere.

This is not an argument against cloud services. The cloud can be useful. The problem is lock-in: when your data exists in a format you cannot freely open, copy, or restore without the vendor's permission.

I had followed some version of this principle for years, but Steph Ango's essay File over app gave me the words for it: applications are temporary, while the things we create should remain under our control.

Before trusting a tool with something important, run the exit test:

• Can I export everything?
• Is the exported data actually usable?
• Can I restore it without depending on the original tool?

If the answer is no, the tool may be convenient, but the data is not entirely yours.