Coming From Time Garden
Already journaling in the original Time Garden vault? The compatibility engine moves your notes into the Celestial Vault and converts them in one click.
If you've been journaling in the original Time Garden vault, your notes don't have to stay behind. The Celestial Vault includes a compatibility engine that recognizes a Time Garden import, moves your journal notes into Celestial's Time Garden tree, and converts them so everything keeps working: banners, day theming, navigation buttons, and your rating and Wheel of Life charts.
One click. Your history comes home.
How It Starts
Import your old Time Garden vault the same way you'd import any vault:
- During welcome at the import step, or
- Anytime later via Settings → Celestial Plugin → Migration → Import an existing vault
(The general import flow is covered on Importing Your Old Vault.)
When the import finishes and the imported folder looks like a Time Garden vault, a dialog appears:
Time Garden vault detected 🌱
This import looks like a Time Garden vault. The compatibility engine can move its journal notes into your Celestial Time Garden tree and convert them so banners, day theming, charts, and navigation keep working.
Click Convert my Time Garden and the engine does the rest. (If you imported during welcome, the offer waits politely until the welcome flow has finished.)
What The Conversion Does
1. Your journal notes move into the live tree.
Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly notes relocate from old vault/<name>/ into the Celestial Vault's Time Garden/ folders, keeping their year and month structure. They're moved, not duplicated; the rest of your imported vault (regular notes, images, templates) stays in old vault/<name>/ like any other import.
2. Each note gets converted to the Celestial format.
The engine walks every relocated note and quietly fixes what the years changed:
- Banners repoint to the current banner art, so your old monthly notes pick up Celestial's artwork
- Day and month theming classes update, so a Tuesday from 2024 glows in Tuesday colors
- Navigation buttons (← Yesterday, Next Month →) repoint to the new folder locations
- Rating and Wheel of Life charts repoint to the current chart scripts, so your historical data keeps rendering
- Buttons for features that no longer exist are removed instead of sitting there broken
3. Old layers become archives.
Celestial's structure differs a little from standalone Time Garden (see How Celestial's Time Garden Differs):
- Quarterly notes: Celestial's quarterly layer is the Dreamline, a planning canvas rather than a rollup. Your old quarterly rollups stay alongside as beautiful, fully readable archives.
- Weekly notes: Celestial has no weekly layer. Your weekly notes come along anyway, converted into readable archives in
Time Garden/02 Weekly/. Nothing new is created there; nothing old is lost.
Safety Guarantees
The conversion never overwrites anything.
If a note already exists at the destination (say you've already written today's daily in Celestial and your old vault has one too), the existing Celestial note wins and the old one stays in old vault/<name>/. The engine moves and converts; it never replaces.
And it's safe to run repeatedly. Already-converted notes are recognized and left alone, so re-running the conversion is always a no-op on clean notes and a fix on missed ones.
Re-Running The Conversion
If a conversion was interrupted, or you imported a second Time Garden vault, or you just want peace of mind:
- Open the Command Palette (
Cmd/Ctrl + P) - Run "Convert legacy Time Garden notes (compatibility engine)"
- Confirm
The command picks up any Time Garden import still sitting under old vault/, converts it, and re-checks the notes already in your tree. A notice reports how many notes were moved and converted.
Which Time Garden Versions Work
All of them. The engine inspects each note individually and infers what needs fixing from the note itself, not from a version number. A vault that mixes notes from several Time Garden versions (because you updated along the way) converts cleanly; each note gets exactly the fixes it needs.
After The Conversion
Open one of your old daily notes. The banner is there, the weekday colors are right, the navigation buttons work, and your monthly charts draw the same lines they always did, now inside the Celestial aesthetic.
Your streak, though, starts fresh. The Journal Widget counts consistency from the day you arrive; old notes don't backfill it. Consider it a new chapter with your whole library on the shelf behind you.
Up Next
- Importing Your Old Vault — the general import flow this builds on
- How Celestial's Time Garden Differs — why weekly notes became archives
- Dreamlines — what replaced the quarterly rollup