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Published by Floriva · Updated 2026-04-28 · How Floriva checks its guides

How to Rebuild Your Period History After Switching Apps

Switched period trackers and worried about losing your cycle history? Reconstruct it from exports, medical records, and secondary sources in under an hour.

Switching period trackers does not mean starting from zero. If you have an export file from your old app, you can seed your new tracker in under 15 minutes. If you deleted first and forgot to export, there are four other sources for reconstructing your cycle history. This guide covers all of them.

The two scenarios: you have an export, or you don't

Rebuilding your period history after switching apps is mostly a reading comprehension problem if you exported first, and a detective problem if you didn't. Both are solvable.

The good news: modern cycle prediction algorithms are more capable than most users expect. You don't need three years of perfect data to get accurate predictions. You need 2-3 complete cycle records. If you can provide that from an export, healthcare records, or reconstruction, your new app will be useful within a month.

Here's how to work through each scenario.

If you have an export file

This is the best-case scenario, and the shortest path.

Flo exports arrive as a ZIP file. Inside is typically a JSON or CSV with cycle dates, symptom logs, and account metadata. Open the cycle log file and look for cycle_start entries or the equivalent. Sort by date descending and note the last 3-6 dates.

Clue exports are a CSV with columns for date, category, and logged data. Filter or sort the spreadsheet to show rows where the period or cycle_start category is logged. Note the dates.

Glow, Stardust, Natural Cycles, and most other trackers export in similar CSV or JSON formats. The specific column names vary, but cycle start dates are always present in the export. Open the file in a spreadsheet app and search for the relevant column.

What you actually need from the export: cycle start dates only. Everything else, symptoms, mood, fertility notes, is nice context but not what the new tracker's algorithm uses for prediction calibration.

Enter these dates during your new tracker's onboarding. Floriva and Euki both include a cycle history step in their setup flows. Enter dates from most recent to oldest.

For specifics on reading Clue's CSV format, see our post-Clue-export guide.

If you deleted without exporting

This is frustrating but not catastrophic. Here are four sources of cycle history you may not have considered.

Healthcare records

Any recent visit to a gynecologist, primary care provider, or OB/GYN includes an intake form that asks for your last menstrual period (LMP). These dates are recorded in your medical chart.

Request records from your provider for the last 1-3 years. Most providers offer patient portals where you can access visit summaries. Look for the "Chief Complaint" or "History" section. LMP is typically recorded there.

This gives you verifiable cycle start dates that are independent of any app. Even two or three dates from different visits are useful for anchoring your reconstruction.

Photos and calendar entries

Look through your photo library for events where you remember being on your period. Concerts, trips, significant family events, the memory of "I was miserable at that thing" combined with an exact date from a photo creates a usable data point.

Check your calendar for any entries you made at the time, including appointments, notes, or reminders. Some people note period start dates on their calendars even when they use an app.

Look in notes apps (Apple Notes, Notion, phone memos) for any date-anchored health notes.

Financial records

Pharmacy purchases of period products, birth control prescriptions filled, or gynecology appointments paid for all carry dates. Bank and credit card statements from the last 2-3 years can surface dates you can cross-reference with calendar memory.

This is a secondary source, you're looking for corroborating dates, not primary records. But if you need to anchor a specific month and you know you bought something relevant, the statement gives you the date.

App notification history (if you still have the old phone)

If you deleted the app but still have the same phone, look in your phone's notification history (on Android, some launchers retain this). If you received period reminders or predictions from the old app, those notifications may contain dates.

On iPhone, this option is more limited, but if you used the Health app's period tracking feature alongside a third-party app, check Health app data, some apps write back to Apple Health, and that data may still be there even if the source app is deleted.

Entering history in your new on-device tracker

Once you have whatever cycle start dates you've recovered, even if it's only one or two, enter them during your new tracker's setup.

Most on-device trackers handle sparse history gracefully. Floriva's algorithm generates predictions from as few as one cycle date and refines them as you log subsequent periods. The predictions will be less precise at first and will stabilize after 2-3 new cycles.

What to enter:

• Cycle start dates (the first day of bleeding)

• Approximate cycle length if you remember it (if not, 28 days is a starting default that the app will refine)

• You do not need to enter every symptom, flow level, or note from your old app, the prediction engine runs on cycle dates

What to expect:

• First prediction: moderate accuracy, wide confidence window

• After 1 new cycle logged: tighter predictions

• After 2-3 new cycles logged: comparable accuracy to a seeded import

Don't let imperfect history keep you from switching. The privacy risk of remaining in a cloud-based app while you wait for a clean historical record is more concrete than the inconvenience of a few months of less precise predictions.

Protecting the history you've rebuilt

Once you've entered your historical dates into your new on-device tracker, that history lives on your phone. Back it up using the tracker's built-in backup feature (most on-device trackers offer encrypted local backup or optional encrypted cloud backup that you control) rather than relying on the app developer's server.

If you're using Floriva, see our Floriva anonymous tracking setup guide for configuring backup and data controls from the start.

For more on how data portability works across different period tracker export formats, see our data portability guide.