All My Journals - Frequently Asked Questions

These FAQs are for users, not potential users, so if you haven't downloaded All My Journals yet, you should do so. These questions are actual questions asked by real users, unlike FAQs on other sites which are little more than a sales pitch to pull in new customers.

All My Journals was designed and built so that even novice PC users could use it without needing assistance or support. It has very few configurable options that can cause confusion, and what you see is very much what you get. The software is best used if you learn the few basic keyboard shortcuts, particularly the navigation shortcuts. To do this, click the Shortcuts menu on the Help menu of All My Journals. (I'm talking about the software here, not this website - don't laugh, this sort of instruction leads to confusing support emails.)

So, a few common questions that users have asked:

1. How do I install All My Journals onto a thumb drive?
If you already have All My Journals installed on your PC, you should ensure that the Journal Location is set to My Documents, otherwise your thumb drive installation will not know where to find it.

After ensuring the above, close All My Journals if open, run the installation program and select your thumb drive as the install folder instead of the default "Program Files" folder. When All My Journals launches, open the Preferences dialog from the Tools menu and select Option 2 - Installation Folder. This will move all your Journals from "My Documents" into the install folder on your thumb drive and you're good to go.

As All My Journals will be installed on a portable drive, there will not be an icon on every desktop you use it on. This means you will need to double click the program file itself to launch it. This file is called allmyjournals.exe, or just allmyjournals (depends on how your PC is set up), and will be located in the "\All My Journals\" folder on your thumb drive. It is a multi colored icon with a picture of a small bookshelf.

If you install onto a thumb drive at a later date (after using it on your PC for some time), some old backups may remain in your "\My Documents\Bad Wolf Software\All My Journals\" folder. If you wish to wipe all All My Journals presence from your PC, these will need to be manually deleted.

Be aware that the speed of All My Journals when run from a plugin drive may vary. This has nothing to do with the software and is down to the quality and speed of your hardware. If your plugin drive 'goes to sleep', you should expect All My Journals to pause every now and then until your drive 'wakes up'.

2. What happens when the Trial Version ends?
The trial version allows you to create multiple journals, and runs for 15 days. If you choose not to purchase a license, All My Journals will revert to the Free, single Journal version when it expires. That single journal will be whatever Journal was last open. If you are not planning to purchase a license, you should export any other Journals out of All My Journals before the trial expires.

3. I've forgotten my password. What do I do?
If you have set a password (Tools menu), you will be prompted to enter it each time you open All My Journals. If you have forgotten your password, none of your Journals can be opened. If you were smart enough to take backups, and if you remember the password in use when you took the backups, you can roll back to one of those backups. See question 5 below.

If you have no backups, then the entries in your Journals are not recoverable. You can 'reset' All My Journals to a blank slate by following the instructions given in question 6 below.

4. I want to store my Journals on my Q drive and install the software on my Z drive. How do I do that?
You can't. The journal location is not configurable to this degree. Your journals can be stored in one of two places: your My Documents folder (the default location), or your installation folder. To change from one to the other, open the Preferences dialog. The more configurable software is, the more problems the majority of users encounter. All My Journals is not aimed at 'super-users.'

5. How do I roll back to a backup from weeks or months ago?
Close All My Journals if it is open.

Locate the backup you wish to roll back to. This will be a dated folder with a name similar to "All My Journals Backup - 10 Sep 2011 15-14-10", and will be in whichever location you chose to save it to. If it doesn't have a name similar to this, then it is NOT an All My Journals backup. Open this folder. It will contain a single folder called "Data". Copy this folder.

Open your current All My Journals Journal Location folder. If your Journal Location is set to My Documents, then this will be the "\Documents\Bad Wolf Software\All My Journals\" folder. If your Journal Location is set to Installation Folder, then that is where it will be. This folder will also contain a folder called "Data" and might contain a folder called "Backup."

Rename the "Data" folder you just found to "Data2", and paste in the backup Data folder you found earlier. Re-Open All My Journals.

6. How do I restore all the original settings of All My Journals, and get back to a blank Journal and no password?
Close All My Journals if it is open.

Delete this "Data" folder. Re-open All My Journals.

But be warned: if you do this you will be deleting all of the contents of all of your Journals.

7. My Journals have all disappeared. What happened?

All My Journals doesn't delete your Journals for any reason. But, it does rely on your journals being in a particular location. If you opened AMJ and the application opened with its empty, default journals, then one of three things happened.

Possibility 1: You may have renamed or deleted the Journal folder in your Documents folder. The default location of All My Journals is your "Documents\Bad Wolf Software\All My Journals" folder. If you deleted this folder because you didn't realise what it contained, then you deleted your Journals. If you renamed this folder, you need to reverse that process.

Possibility 2: Your journals are unique for each individual Windows user. The default location is that user's Documents folder. If Steve runs AMJ under John's account, he will not find his journals, as he is accessing John's Documents folder, and John may never have run AMJ. In this instance, AMJ will assume that John is launching it for the first time, and will setup the default journals for him. The solution is for Steve to log back in to Windows under his own user name, and he will find his journals waiting for him.

Possibility 3: If you changed the journal location so that you can run it from a thumb drive, and then tried to launch AMJ from your desktop, it will not find any journals, and so will set up as a new instance of AMJ, with default journals. This is because a thumb drive installation can only be run from the thumb drive. It's completely self contained - it needs to be, otherwise you wouldn't be able to plug it in to new PCs as you move around. You must double click the AMJ icon on the thumb drive, and not on your desktop.

These are the only cases where you can launch AMJ and not see your journals. The journals are not deleted, you're simply trying to access them in the wrong way.

8. Where is the save button?
There isn't one. Anything you write will be saved automatically when you close All My Journals or move to a different day or month. Save buttons have no place in most software, and are little more than a throw back to the early days of desktop software. Trust the software to know when to save and to do the job for you - that's what it's there for.

9. I've downloaded a newer version of All My Journals, but it's not installing.
You probably still have the old version open and running. Close the old version, and re-run the installation for the newer version.

10. How do I print?
Printing is only available in the licensed or trial versions of All My Journals. If you are using the Free version, you should use the Export option to export your Day or Month out of All My Journals, ensure that the "Open file in my word processor" option is checked, then print from there.

11. Can I store my Journals in my Dropbox folder?
Not at this time. Testing has shown that Dropbox's synchronization is not stable enough for All My Journals. As all of your Journals are encrypted, the files must be in perfect condition in order to be opened. If Dropbox has not completed a synchronization, All My Journals will fail to open your Journal. All My Journals is fully portable and can be installed on to a portable drive - see question 1 above.