On June 17, 2013, I downloaded an app called Moves. It tracked everywhere I went, automatically, beautifully. Just lines on a map that told the story of my day. Where I walked. Where I biked. Where I drove. It was elegant. It was unobtrusive. It was everything I wanted from technology that claimed to help me remember.
I used it every day for five years.
Then Facebook bought it in 2014. I told myself it would be fine. Moves was popular. Facebook wouldn’t kill something people actually used.
On July 30, 2018, I opened Moves for the last time. The next day, the service shut down. “Due to low usage,” Facebook said. Four years after the acquisition, gone. I managed to export my data—five years of everywhere I’d been, every route I’d walked, every ordinary Tuesday. But the export sat on my hard drive for years. A JSON file no other service could read. A life compressed into a format designed for machines, not memory.
I am a data refugee. And I am not alone.
The Services That Died
Five devices. Five shutdowns. One lesson.
Moves wasn’t the first service I trusted with my life data. It wouldn’t be the last. Over the years, I kept trying—kept entrusting pieces of myself to products that promised to help me remember. Each one felt different. Each one felt like this time it would last.
Basis
In the fall of 2013, I was preparing for a bike ride from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco. Kevin Kelly—co-founder of Wired, one of the catalysts behind the Quantified Self movement—had ridden the coast at a later age and said that if he could do it, anyone could. So I decided to do it. I bought a Basis watch because I wanted to capture what my body was doing during those weeks on the road. It tracked five streams of biometric data: heart rate, skin temperature, galvanic skin response, motion, and ambient temperature. No fitness tracker before or since has matched that depth of measurement. It painted a picture of my physical self I’d never seen before.
Then in June 2016, Intel issued a warning: the watch was overheating. Some users reported burns and blisters. Intel tried a software fix. It failed. On August 3, 2016, they issued a full recall. On December 31, 2016, they shut down the Basis service entirely. Intel had purchased Basis for $100 million in 2014. Two and a half years later, they walked away.
I exported my biometric data before the shutdown. It’s still sitting on my hard drive—heart rate readings, temperature patterns, sleep data, the biometrics from over 1,100 miles on a bicycle down the Pacific coast. I aspire to import it into Silo someday, to give that data a second life. But for now, it waits. The ride itself, though—every mile of it—is in Silo. I had Moves running on my phone the entire journey.
Narrative Clip
On September 15, 2012, I was at a Quantified Self conference in Palo Alto when I met the founding team of a Swedish startup called Memoto. They were showing a prototype of a tiny camera you’d clip to your shirt that took a photo every thirty seconds. Automatic. Passive. Just... documentation. I was immediately hooked. I backed the Kickstarter.
Coincidentally, I tried to get early access to the clip for that same Portland-to-San Francisco bike ride in 2013. I emailed the team, hoping to capture the whole journey through their lens. I didn’t get one in time. So I mounted a GoPro to my handlebars and captured the entire ride as one gigantic time lapse video instead.
On October 8, 2014—the camera now rebranded as Narrative—I finally clipped it to my shirt for the first time. By the end of a day, I’d have thousands of images showing what I’d actually seen. My desk. The coffee shop. The walk home. My kids’ faces.
I wore it to a Quantified Self conference in San Francisco in 2015. At the Interval at Long Now—a bar inside a foundation dedicated to ten-thousand-year thinking—fellow QS enthusiasts recognized the device on my shirt and would walk up and double-tap it to take a photo of themselves. They knew exactly what it was. Over the years at these conferences I met Kevin Kelly, Gordon Bell—whose MyLifeBits project at Microsoft was one of the most ambitious attempts to record an entire human life—and dozens of others chasing the same idea. We were a tribe, briefly, of people who believed that documenting your life this way meant something.
My last Narrative photo was taken on August 10, 2017. By then, the company was gone. They’d announced “temporary financial difficulties” in 2016, then filed for voluntary dissolution. The venture capital dried up. The wearables market crashed. Some former employees bought the assets and kept things limping along under a new company called Third Dot. But the trajectory was clear.
I managed to export everything—millions of photos organized into folders by year, month, day. Folders within folders within folders. I still have all of it. But millions of photos without context or searchability might as well be a haystack without a needle. I think about that library a lot. I believe modern AI and machine learning could resurrect it—could find the meaningful moments buried in millions of mundane frames. Somewhere in there are ordinary moments with my kids that I’d give anything to surface. But for now, it sits.
Automatic
One of my primary motivations for buying an Automatic adapter was my 1995 Lexus ES 300. I was trying to squeeze every last mile out of that car, and the Automatic plugged into the OBD-II diagnostic port and turned it into something almost intelligent. Engine codes decoded. Diagnostic help for maintenance decisions. And for someone like me—someone who wants to document everything—all of my trip data. Every drive. Every route. I loved it so much I bought a second one for my other vehicle.
Then COVID hit. On May 1, 2020, Automatic announced they were shutting down. Services would end May 28.
This is the story that still hurts.
I had been making periodic data exports from the service—I’d learned by then to never fully trust that a service would last. But I missed the shutdown notice. By the time I read the email, the deadline had passed. The opportunity to download my complete data was gone.
Every drive from those years. The road trips. The daily commutes. The diagnostic data that kept my old Lexus running. Gone—not sitting in an orphaned folder I can’t quite open, but truly, permanently gone. I didn’t even get the chance to try to save it.
Of all the data I’ve lost, this one still saddens me the most. Not because it was the most valuable, but because I almost had it. I’d been making exports. I was paying attention. I just didn’t pay attention fast enough.
Limitless
By the time I backed the Limitless pendant on Kickstarter, I’d learned my lesson.
I was excited about the technology—an AI-powered wearable that records conversations, transcribes them, makes them searchable. But my motivation was personal. My kids are all young, and they say the most incredible things. I wanted to capture the privilege of raising them. The offhand remarks at dinner. The bedtime questions that stop you cold. The things you think you’ll remember but won’t.
This time, I wasn’t naive. I immediately connected Limitless to Silo and captured my content on a daily basis. Every conversation, transcribed and stored on my terms.
On December 5, 2025, Meta acquired Limitless. The pendant would no longer be sold. The service would wind down.
I know how this story ends. I’ve been here before. But this time, I had all my data. Every conversation, already safe.
I switched to using my pendant with Omi and built an integration into Silo. The experience isn’t the same as what I had with Limitless—it rarely is when you’re forced to migrate—but the data keeps flowing. The conversations keep getting captured. My kids keep saying incredible things, and I keep saving them.
The Ritual
The same story, every time
Each time a service dies, the same ritual plays out:
- 01 The announcement. “We have some difficult news to share.”
- 02 The date. “Services will shut down on [date].”
- 03 The export window. “You can download your data until then.”
- 04 The format. JSON. CSV. Proprietary files no one else can read.
- 05 The promise. “We’re working with partners to ensure continuity.”
- 06 The silence. No partner ever appears.
Three shutdown notices. Three versions of the same story.
If you’re lucky, you get the data out. Moves. Basis. Narrative. I was lucky with those—I have the files. But files without a home aren’t memories. They’re potential energy, waiting for something to bring them back to life.
If you’re unlucky, you miss the window. Automatic. I was unlucky with that one. The data is just gone.
Either way, you lose something. Either the data itself, or years of your life trapped in formats that only a dead service could read, waiting for someone to build an importer that never comes.
The Pattern
Growth over permanence
This isn’t just about me. This is about everyone who trusted services that didn’t outlast their funding rounds.
Look at Killed by Google—the open-source graveyard documenting every service Google has shut down. Hundreds of entries. Google Reader. Google+. Inbox. Google Podcasts. Services people loved, relied on, built workflows around. Gone.
Facebook bought Moves and killed it in 2018 “due to low usage.” Intel spent $100 million to buy Basis, then shut it down two and a half years later. Narrative raised money from Kickstarter backers who believed in lifelogging, then went bankrupt when VC interest in wearables collapsed. Automatic disappeared in the chaos of a pandemic.
This is the pattern: companies chase growth, not sustainability. They raise venture capital, which means they need an exit—acquisition or IPO. If that doesn’t happen, they shut down. Your data is collateral damage.
What We Actually Lose
A spectrum of grief
The data itself is quantifiable. X number of days tracked. Y number of photos. Z number of drives.
But what we actually lose is harder to measure.
I lost every drive I took during my years with Automatic. The road trips. The daily commutes. That data is gone forever because I read an email three days too late.
I have millions of Narrative photos sitting in folders, organized by year, month, day—but without a way to search them, they’re a library with no catalog. Somewhere in those millions of frames are moments with my kids I’d give anything to find again.
I have Basis biometric data that could tell me things about my body during an 1,100-mile bike ride down the Pacific coast—if I could find a way to read it. The route itself is preserved in Silo, thanks to Moves. But what my heart and skin and sleep were doing during those weeks? Locked in an export I haven’t cracked yet.
I have five years of Moves location data that sat dormant on my hard drive for years before I finally figured out how to import it into Silo and bring it back to life.
The loss isn’t binary. It’s not just “have it” or “don’t.” It’s a spectrum: truly gone, technically present but effectively inaccessible, exported but waiting, rescued but only after years of effort. Each point on that spectrum represents a different kind of grief for a data refugee.
The Realization
The wrong question
Somewhere around the third or fourth shutdown, I understood something:
I was asking the wrong question.
I kept asking: “Which service should I trust with my data?”
The right question was: “Why am I trusting anyone else at all?”
My family has kept letters for over a century. Four generations of handwritten correspondence, stored in boxes and drawers, passed down through decades. They survived wars. They survived moves. They survived the deaths of the people who wrote them.
They survived because we kept them. Because paper doesn’t require servers or subscriptions or venture capital. Because the format didn’t change. Because no company could decide they weren’t profitable and shut them down.
I can hold a letter my great-grandmother wrote in 1910 and read her words. But I can’t open my Automatic data from 2018 because I missed an email.
Something is backwards here.
What I Did About It
Building something that lasts
I started building Silo.
Not as a startup. Not to raise money or chase growth metrics. I built it because I needed it to exist. I built it because I was tired of losing my data—or spending years trying to rescue it from formats no one else could read.
I’ve used Silo every day for nearly a decade now. It pulls in data from services I trust (while they last) and stores it immediately, on my terms. When Limitless got acquired by Meta, I didn’t panic. I already had every conversation. I built an Omi integration and kept going.
That Moves data that sat dormant for years? I eventually figured out how to import it. Five years of daily location data, resurrected. Those 1,800-plus days are in Silo now, alongside everything else—my places, my people, my experiences. Given a second life.
Silo isn’t perfect. It isn’t finished. Software never is.
But it’s mine. And it’s been running longer than most of the services that failed me.
More importantly: it’s built on different principles.
Your data is yours. You can export everything, anytime, in open formats. No hostage situations. No proprietary lock-in.
Permanence over growth. I’m not building Silo to flip it to an acquirer. I’m building it because I need it to exist for the rest of my life.
If the worst happens—if I can’t maintain it anymore—I commit to giving you maximum notice, ensuring your data is fully exportable, and releasing the code so you or someone else can keep it running.
I’ve been the person frantically exporting data from a dying service. I’ve been the person who read the shutdown email three days too late. I won’t make you be that person.
For the Other Refugees
You are not alone
If you’ve lost data to a service that shut down, you know this feeling. The mix of anger and resignation. The “I should have seen this coming” that you couldn’t have prevented.
You’re not alone.
We trusted services that prioritized growth over permanence. That’s not our fault. They built useful things. They made reasonable promises. We believed them.
But we can learn from it.
We can ask different questions: Who controls my data? What happens if this service shuts down? Can I export everything in formats I can actually use? Is the business model subscription—or venture capital roulette?
We can build different things: Tools that prioritize ownership over engagement. Software designed to outlast its funding. Services that treat user data as something sacred, not a growth metric.
We can remember that documentation—real documentation, the kind that survives—requires permanence, not optimization. Memory, not metrics. Principles, not pivots.
I am a data refugee.
I have years of my life in folders I’m still trying to open. Steps I took. Roads I drove. Heartbeats. Conversations. Millions of photos I can’t search. And one set of driving data I’ll never get back because I read an email too late.
But I’m not losing data that way again.
And if you’re reading this and nodding—if you’ve been here too—you don’t have to either.
Adam Thede
Nashville, 2026