Escape from Notion#
Hello everyone, I am Ajian. Recently, I found that the internet connection has been getting worse when using Notion. Today, I will share with you how to sync data from Notion to Obsidian.
First, we need to install the official Obsidian plugin called Importer.
After installing Importer, a download icon (should be an import icon) will appear.
You can see that this plugin supports importing various forms of notes.
According to Obsidian's official statement, it can accommodate refugees from various note-taking apps such as Apple Notes, Bear, Evernote, Google Keep, HTML (flomo supports exporting HTML), OneNote, Notion, Roam Research, etc.
Instructions#
Click on "Settings & members" on the left side of Notion.
Select "Workspace-Settings".
Choose "Export all workspace content" to export all your content.
After exporting in "Markdown & CSV" format
Although there are not many notes, the file size is quite large. Later, I checked and found that it was because there were too many images.
In Obsidian, click on the Importer icon and select Notion as the file type.
After selecting our file, click on "Import".
There may also be some failed imports.
But there are not many of them.
The final imported result is like this. Previously, it was data in a table format, which was not well represented. Each line only listed the attributes.
User Experience#
Obsidian, the end of everything.
After trying it out, Ajian found that there are still some small issues with importing Notion into Obsidian:
- It only supports importing standard page types from Notion, and it doesn't adapt well to complex formatting in pages.
- Notion's database support is not very good, so even if it can be imported, it cannot display the effects of Notion's databases.
- Of course, the larger the exported data from Notion, the slower the import into Obsidian.
But fortunately, Ajian has always emphasized using standard markdown syntax when taking notes. Also, Ajian has always treated Notion as an online repository, where Notion only retrieves data through APIs, and all data exists in their respective apps. In a sense, the data will not be lost: data from Douban is in Douban, data from WeChat Reading is in WeChat Reading.
The process of importing other note-taking apps into Obsidian is similar, so Ajian won't demonstrate them one by one. For those who want to escape from Notion, you can give it a try yourself!