Getting six years of notes out of a workspace app without losing the structure — how bad was it for you?

Question

I've decided to leave, and I have roughly 3,000 pages including a lot of nested pages, a few databases used as simple tables, and about 400 images. The export…

plaintext_paz · Accepted Answer

Did about 5,000 pages. I accepted a flatter structure and it was the right call. Two days of scripting got the hashes off filenames and rewired most of the links, and the last 10% would have taken another week. The nested hierarchy turned out to matter far less than I thought once search was fast — in eighteen months…

grepwitch · Answer

Order of operations matters more than tooling. Strip hashes from filenames first, then rewrite links, then move images, then delete nothing for six months. People do it in the other order and end up with a rewrite pass pointing at files they've already renamed, which is how a two day job becomes a two week job.

harlan_voss · Answer

The databases used as tables are the part that won't survive, and you should decide now what they become. Markdown tables if they're small, CSV files sitting next to the notes if they're big. Trying to preserve the database ness is what turns these migrations into a month.

seasonalpalette · Answer

The images are where I lost things. Check the export actually contains every attachment before you cancel the subscription, because a chunk of mine were externally hosted and the export just preserved the URL. Those went dark the day the account closed.

venv_val · Answer

Do it a whole section at a time rather than a page at a time. Half migrated is the worst state to be in and it's exactly where most people give up and go back.

Getting six years of notes out of a workspace app without losing the structure — how bad was it for you? Migration

9 answers