Import and export

Importing

Settings → Vault → Import data opens the picker — twenty sources, grouped into notes, chat and email. Pick the one you are coming from and it tells you how to produce the export before asking for a file, because getting the export out of the other app is the step people are actually missing.

Whatever the source, the result is the same: plain markdown notes in folders that mirror the original structure, with [[wikilinks]] resolved across everything imported at once and colliding names suffixed rather than overwritten.

Notes and knowledge

• Obsidian — zip the vault, or drag the folder straight in. It works as-is: the wrapper folder is stripped, .obsidian settings for daily notes and the attachment folder are read, and images and PDFs become attachments (a PDF also becomes a searchable note of its text).
• Notion — export as Markdown & CSV with subpages included. The 32-character page ids Notion appends to every filename are stripped, and links between pages are rewritten to [[wikilinks]] so backlinks and the graph work immediately. Databases arrive as markdown tables plus the individual row notes.
• Evernote — export a notebook as .enex. Notebooks become folders, tags and source URLs become properties, and embedded images are resolved back out of the file and attached.
• Google Keep — export from Google Takeout. Checklists keep their ticked state, labels become tags, and archived and trashed notes land in their own folders.
• Apple Notes, Logseq, Bear, Trilium, Anytype — any markdown or TextBundle export. Logseq journals are renamed from 2024_01_15 to a real date.
• Roam Research — JSON export. [[links]] and #tags already match, so the graph fills in on import; block references become the text they pointed at.
• Joplin — a .jex export, with the notebook tree rebuilt from its ids.
• Standard Notes — a decrypted backup; an encrypted one cannot be read by anything but Standard Notes, and the importer says so rather than reporting an empty success.
• Markdown files — any folder of .md, .txt or .html from anywhere.

Chat

Slack, Discord and Telegram exports become one note per channel per day, with an index note per channel and one for the workspace — so the graph gets a shape instead of several thousand orphans.

Email

Gmail (a Takeout .mbox), Outlook and any .eml or .mbox become one note per message, foldered by Gmail label where there is one. Quoted reply chains are trimmed; attachments are listed by name rather than imported.

Why exports rather than "connect your account"

For most of these there is no other honest option. Google's Keep API is Workspace-only and cannot be authorised by a personal account at all. Gmail's scopes require an annual third-party security audit costing five figures. Slack limits new apps to one history request per minute. Telegram's Bot API cannot read your own history, and scripting a Discord user account is a bannable offence. Evernote's API was withdrawn. An export gives you the same data in minutes, for nothing.

Notion, OneNote and Outlook do have usable APIs, and a live connection for those is possible — it needs an app registered for the instance you are using.

Exporting

Export vault downloads a zip of every note as <path>.md, folders preserved. It is your notes, as plain files; nothing is proprietary.

Attachments

Paste or drag an image or PDF into a note and it uploads and embeds at the cursor as ![[name.png]]. Images show inline; hovering an embed previews it. Files are capped at 5 MB, and only common image and document types are accepted.