Converts from other notetaking software: how, why, and was your conversion complete?
Converts from other notetaking software: how, why, and was your conversion complete?
On the "conversion complete" bit: if you migrated your stuff from, say, Notion, did you move all of it to Obsidian or do you still use Notion for some things?
I moved from Notion after I made a database of about 40 items and Notion became super slow for me. I manually moved my information over and didn't finish doing that. I don't use Notion anymore, except to transfer things that are still hanging out there. (They are not things I expect to need to reference frequently, hence being able to not use Notion and leave them untransferred. However, I still want to transfer them because I might need to at some point, and want it in one place instead of having to run back to Notion.)
I used to use Google Docs for my academic notes and have been writing new ones in Obsidian. I transferred a few docs manually, but the rest are, like with Notion, untransferred and still in Google Docs. Since I still do use Docs for anything collaborative, since the workspace is still something I use, it is still convenient for me to just search for my old academic notes in Docs. Would like to eventually transfer to Obsidian. I originally wanted Notion to be my place for everything, and to move all my Docs information to Notion. Now that I've abandoned Notion for Obsidian, my goal to move my Docs information has changed to moving it to Obsidian.
There are probably plugins to transfer from these places to Obsidian, or at least some script to make .md files out of Notion and Docs things. Part of why I don't do this is because when I transfer, I also like to clean up the information. Investigate things that were written down hastily that I no longer understand, make that stream-of-consciousness more comprehensible, remove information or to-do-later things that are no longer relevant…
I started with Cornell NTS ages ago by hand, then the volume of my notes necessarily expanded and the moment I learned there was a native app (MacOS) that supported wiki-style formatting and paired it all up with the Zettelkasten concept, I was hooked.
3You just brought back some unpleasant memories from high school English
The teacher insisted we take Cornell notes
I couldn't stand how they were organized, i was/am crap at taking notes during a lecture, and I didn't need them. I'm very good at remembering information from lectures
2Oh man that’s awful. The best note system is the note system one actually uses. I had no idea how to take adequate notes until I “discovered” Cornell NTS during my second or third college attempt.
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For dummies like me, Cornell NTS is just Cornell Note Taking System, which seems to include but is not exactly the same thing as Cornell Notes.
1It really revolutionized my learning. Taking notes in this way necessarily generates a study guide which can easily be turned into flash cards.
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I've been doing it the slow manual way from MyInfo. Mainly because it’s been a good way to clean up and reorganize / trim stuff in the process. New items only go into Obsidian, of course.
3I feel you on the reorganizing and cleanup—same reason I do all my transfer manually.
2Not to mention, Obsidian is such a pleasure to work with, I don't mind doing the work manually. If I had thousands of files/folders to deal with, I'm sure I'd be hunting down an import tool of some kind. But my needs are pretty modest.
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I used to use a split between Joplin and Obsidian — Obsidian was primarily used for more formal notes, while Joplin held my more informal and ephemeral notes. I became increasingly frustrated with Joplin — it felt bloated, overcomplicated, and really wasn't the prettiest thing to look at. I used to use an iPhone, so, to get notes to sync to my device with Obsidian, I would've had to pay for Obsidian Sync, which I didn't want to do, so I stayed with Joplin synced to my Nextcloud. But, later, I moved to an Android phone, so I was then able to hook up Syncthing to start syncing my notes between my phone and my other devices nicely. So, I have since moved all my notes from Joplin to Obsidian, and I have had no issues. I wish Obsidian were open source, but, regardless, it is a great piece of software.
2I migrated from an app called Tomboy forever ago to Evernote, then from Evernote to Google Keep and Google Dogs which sucked because it was completely manual. Then I converted from Keep and Docs to Obsidian a couple years ago. Moving from Keep to Obsidian was fairly easy because of Google Takeout, now made much easier with plugins. Converting from Docs was a somewhat manual process, but I've basically got it done. Anything remaining in Google Docs is now an actual document rather than notes.
My ancient Evernote content was re-imported this year using a plugin and put into an Archive folder. Since there were a lot of bookmarks stored in there, it's somewhat handy to have it in an archive folder because I'll see it in search results. Importing the images and whatnot was helpful too, because the initial move to Keep lost a ton of formatting and content alignment.
There is a community plugin named "Importer" that works pretty well, and you should take a look at it. To force the issue of cleanup, I like to have a property assigned to notes for cleaned up or summarized so I can use a dataview to search for notes missing that property or with the property set to false/empty. That way I can go back at my leisure to clean up, summarize, tag, link, etc.
2Hey, thanks for the recommendations! I have never heard of Tomboy so I went and looked it up and from the images I saw on Wikipedia it definitely looks "forever ago".
1I'm amazed that they had a release as late as 2017. I think I stopped using it in 2012 or 2013. A year or two before Ubuntu One was announced to be ending. The app itself was pretty basic, but used an XML format that was in theory very flexible. Having sync built in to Ubuntu was also pretty great. But not supporting images, not being cross platform with my phone, it all sort of fell out of favor with me.
Anyway, good luck with Obsidian.
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