Notion To Obsidian Migration
Back in October, I migrated all of my notes from Notion to Obsidian.
I think that in the long run, having more control over my notes is a good thing. With Obsidian, my notes can be actual files on my computer which I have full control over and can backup and copy however I want.
In 2019, I had become fed up with using OneNote, and with the current version of OneNote at the time, there was no way to export your notes to a file. I had to download the 2016 version of the app in order to get the export feature, and do a whole convoluted process to get my notes into Notion including importing my notes into Evernote and then importing those converted notes into Notion. After that, I had a peaceful 4 years using Notion. Notion is pretty good, but has poor offline support and is also integrating LLM features into the app which I really don't want because my notes are often very personal and you can't turn it off.
I've considered moving my notes from Notion to Obsidian for a while, and I only made the leap in late October.
I intend to store all of my written text using Obsidian. It does mean more work because I have to worry about making backups and managing the filesystem, but who else cares that much about my data other than me?
(Also, the possibility of being able to do incredibly specific things that are tailored to my own workflow by making my own plugins is exciting. I might write about the custom plugins that I've made at some point)
Right now, things aren't quite set up as well as I want. I used Notion for many different things, so there's a bunch of small systems in my vault that all need some work. Often, I need to remind myself that my vault won't die horribly if I let things be janky for a bit while I work things out. The files aren't going anywhere.
On a larger scale, I'm trying to think of ways that I can change my note structure in order to take advantage of Obsidian's strengths. I'm hesitant to get plugins that will be able to essentially recreate my experience with Notion because I might miss out on something that Obsidian does really well.
This isn't a silver bullet that will fix everything. Obsidian might just explode one day and I will be stranded. However, such an event will be much easier to recover from now that I have actual files on my hard drive.
(Also I can have nice themes in Obsidian to make things look nice which you can't do in Notion. I missed customizability.)