Affinity's strength is its relationship graph—the web of who-knows-who, multi-threaded connections, and context density that lives nowhere else. The moment you export to CSV, that graph flattens. You get a contact table. The threads that made Affinity valuable disappear into a spreadsheet. Migrating without a plan means losing months of relationship intelligence you can't recover from email alone. But the data isn't gone—it's just orphaned. This playbook shows you what survives the export, which relationship types vanish, and a concrete 60-day timeline to rebuild depth in your new platform without losing a single connection. What Affinity's export actually gives you (and what it doesn't) When you export your Affinity database, you get a flat contact CSV with these core fields intact: Contact core: Name, email, phone, title, company. Custom fields: Any fields you've created map directly to columns. Lists: Affinity's list tags export as a single concatenated column—usually comma-separated or quoted. Interaction history: Most platforms do not export email logs, call records, or event attendance as structured data. These stay behind. What vanishes entirely: Relationship edges: The connections between contacts (person A knows person B through organization C) do not export as rows—they're implicit in Affinity's interface, not stored as structured foreign keys. Relationship metadata: How strong is the relationship? When did they meet? What was the introduction? Affinity stores this as notes or custom fields, but rarely as discrete, queryable relationship records. Deal-to-contact linkage: Affinity's deal pipeline connects to multiple contacts per deal. Most CSV exports flatten this to a primary contact or a comma list. True many-to-many mapping is lost unless you manually rebuild it. Timeline context: When you see a contact, Affinity shows you every interaction chronologically. A CSV export gives you the current state—not the journey. The good news: None of this is truly lost. It's just not automatically transferred. The difference between a clean migration and one that leaves you with orphaned contacts is 4–6 hours of mapping work upfront, plus 8–10 weeks of deliberate context re-tagging. Step 1: Map your relationship types before you export (Week 1) Before you touch the export button, sit down with your team and answer: What relationships actually matter for your business? In Affinity, relationship types are usually stored as: Custom fields: A picklist like "Relationship Type" with values: Founder, Advisor, Investor, Past Hire, Current Employee, Partner. List membership: Lists like "#Warm Intros," "#Investors Q2-2024," "#Competitors." Deal association: A contact's role in a deal (primary contact, influencer, economic buyer, technical buyer). Notes: Freeform text describing how you know them (met at TechCrunch, referred by X, inbound inquiry). Create a Relationship Inventory Sheet : Relationship Type Stored in Affinity As Migration Strategy Rebuild Priority Investor Custom field + list tag Map to Orin tag + custom field Week 1–2 Past hire List tag ("#Former Team") Preserve as tag, add hire date in notes Week 3–4 Warm intro source Notes field (free text) Extract manually, tag with source contact name Week 5–6 Deal role (primary contact) Deal-level association Export deal-contact map separately, re-import Week 1–2 This sheet becomes your migration contract. It tells you which Affinity data gets priority and which you'll rebuild through tagging over the next 60 days. Step 2: Export strategically—three separate files, not one (Week 1) A single monolithic export is slow to rebuild. Instead, extract three separate CSVs from Affinity and handle each independently: Export 1: Contacts + Lists + Custom Fields Standard full export. Include every custom field, every list, every tag. This is your contact base. Export 2: Deal-to-Contact Map In Affinity, go to each deal and note the associated contacts and their roles (primary, secondary, influencer). Export this as a separate CSV with columns: Deal ID, Deal Name, Contact ID, Contact Name, Role. Do not rely on a CSV export to capture this automatically—Affinity's deal export often collapses multiple contacts into a single name field. Extract it manually or via API if available. Export 3: Interaction Log (Timestamp + Contact + Type) If your migration platform supports it, export or manually log key interactions: email threads with timestamps, call dates, event attendance, and the contact(s) involved. This becomes your "why do we know this person" audit trail and rebuilds the timeline context. Step 3: Identify and tag orphaned records in your new platform (Weeks 2–3) Once you import the contact CSV into your new CRM , you'll have flat records with no relationships between them. Your job in weeks 2–3 is to identify which records are orphaned (not yet tagged with a relationship type or connected to a deal) and mark them for rebuild. Create a spreadsheet of orphaned contact flags: No