KeepsakeHow do I get my documents and plans out of Everplans?
How do I get my documents and plans out of Everplans?
Export or download your files from the account area of Everplans, which gives you the documents you uploaded as ordinary files in folders. The answers you typed into its planning sections are a different kind of content — they are not files, so print or save them separately before you close the account, or they go with it.
Everplans is built around end-of-life planning rather than filing, and that shapes what an export is. Some of what you have there is documents you uploaded. A good deal of it is answers — wishes, instructions, account details, who to call — typed into structured sections.
Those two halves leave the product differently, and anyone telling you a migration is one click has only thought about the first half.
The documents and the answers
The documents are files. They come out as files, in folders that follow the sections you filed them under, and any importer worth using can read that.
The answers are not files. Funeral wishes, where the will is kept, which accounts exist, who has a key — these were typed into fields, and the fields belong to the product. Look for a print or PDF option covering the whole plan, and produce one before you go anywhere. A saved PDF of the plan is a genuinely good artefact regardless: it can be handed to a person, and it needs no login to read on the day it is needed.
This is the part people lose. It is worth twenty minutes and a printed copy in the same place as the will.
Getting the export
Exporting is done from the account or settings area, and the exact wording changes between releases, so we are not printing a click path that will be wrong by next spring. Look for the option to download your files or export your plan; expect the files as an archive, and treat any whole-plan PDF as the second half of the job.
If you have Deputies — people you have granted access to — check what they can see before and after. Their access is a property of the account, and it ends when the account does. Telling them beforehand is not optional politeness; it is the entire mechanism by which your plan reaches anyone.
The headings, and why several have no category anywhere
Everplans organises around planning, so its sections include headings that a document vault has no equivalent for at all — a digital-life section, a funeral section, an "after I am gone" section. These are not filing categories in any ordinary sense, and forcing them into one would be a mistake.
What a sensible importer does with a heading it has no category for is nothing clever: the document is filed under Other and the original heading is kept as a tag. Which sounds like giving up, and is the opposite — a document filed under a category the importer invented is one you cannot find, because you will not think to look for it there. Filed under Other with "Funeral" attached, it is one search away and the word is still yours.
Headings that do map cleanly — legal, insurance, health, financial, identification — carry across as categories, and keep their tag as well.
Keeping the plan working after the move
Whatever you move to, the planning half only works if two things stay true, and neither is about software:
- Somebody else can get in. An archive only you can open is a problem you have moved, not solved. Whatever the new arrangement is, rehearse it with the person who will need it — while you are here to correct what goes wrong.
- The instructions live with the documents. The plan PDF, the note saying where the will is, the list of who to call — these belong in the same place as the files they refer to, not in an email folder.
There is a whole guide on this problem, and it is the one part of the exercise that is genuinely about people rather than tools.
Step by step
- Save or print the whole plan first. The typed answers are not files and will not be in a file export. This is the step people skip and regret.
- Download the documents from the account area. Unpack the archive somewhere you can see the folder structure.
- Tell anyone with access what is changing. Deputy access ends with the account. Whatever replaces it has to be arranged deliberately, not assumed.
- Copy out expiry dates and reference numbers. Anything that was a field rather than a file needs to come out by hand. A two-column spreadsheet is enough, and it can become a sidecar file that an importer reads.
- Import the folder. Recognised headings become categories; every heading is kept as a tag, including the ones that map to nothing.
Questions
Will my planning answers import into a document vault?
No, and be suspicious of anything claiming otherwise. They are structured answers inside another product, not documents. Save them as a PDF and file that PDF like any other document — which is, in practice, the form they need to be in on the day somebody uses them.
What happens to headings like "After I'm Gone" or "Digital Life"?
The documents under them are filed under Other and the heading is kept as a tag. No guessing at a category, because a wrong category is worse than an obvious one: you cannot search for a heading you did not choose.
Does Keepsake sign in to Everplans?
No. There is no connection to Everplans at any point — no sign-in, no OAuth, no credential of theirs, and no server of ours in the path. Keepsake reads a folder already on your disk.
Is Everplans worth keeping?
If you are using the planning side seriously — the wishes, the instructions, the deputies — it does something a document vault does not, and there is a good case for keeping it for that alone. If it has become a place you upload files to, it is an expensive filing cabinet and it is fair to ask what it is for.
What should I do about the people I gave access to?
Tell them before you change anything, and rehearse the new route with at least one of them. Access arrangements fail silently: nobody discovers the plan does not work until the day it is needed, and by then the person who could have fixed it is the reason it is needed.
Where Keepsake fits
Keepsake is our product, so read this part with that in mind. Everything above is true whether or not you use it, and most of it you can do with a folder and an afternoon.
Keepsake reads an Everplans download as a folder tree — recognising the export from its own section names, mapping the headings it has categories for, and keeping every heading as a tag where it does not. Windows, Android and the web app, from one shared definition, with nothing uploaded and nothing asked of Everplans.
On the planning half, we are honest about the overlap: Keepsake has a Legacy Access Kit — a sealed way for someone you choose to open the vault if you cannot — and a family file for the details that are not documents. What it is not is a guided end-of-life planning product with prompts for every decision. If that guidance is what you value, Everplans does it better and it is reasonable to keep both: the plan there, the documents somewhere they are encrypted on your own device.