Leaving Notion: what actually moves, and what does not

People leave Notion for a few reasons. It got slow. They only ever used a tenth of it. They opened it one day and could not find the page they wrote last week. Or they realised they were spending more time arranging the workspace than using it.

Whatever the reason, the question is the same: what actually comes with you.

What the export gives you

Notion exports as Markdown and CSV, or as HTML, in a zip. Settings, then the workspace section, then Export all workspace content.

What you get back is reasonable and lossy in specific ways. Page text survives as Markdown. Databases come out as CSV files, one per database, with a folder of the pages alongside. Uploaded files come out as real files. Images embedded in pages come out too.

What does not survive: relations between databases become plain text, rollups and formulas become their last computed value, views and filters are gone entirely, comments are gone, and the page hierarchy becomes nested folders with long names ending in a hash.

That last one is the practical annoyance. Every file is called something like Meeting notes 3f2a9c1b4d5e6f708192a3b4c5d6e7f8.md, and the hash is not going anywhere.

Sort your content into three piles first

Before you move anything, it helps to be honest about what you have. In most workspaces it divides fairly cleanly.

• Things you wrote and might read again. Notes, drafts, meeting records, documentation.
• Things you collected. PDFs, screenshots, invoices, contracts, images. Files that happen to live in Notion but are not really Notion content.
• Things that only exist because Notion made them easy. Trackers, dashboards, tables of tasks you stopped updating in March.

The third pile is usually the biggest and almost none of it needs to move. Be ruthless with it. A tracker you have not updated in six months is not data, it is a record of an intention.

The second pile is the one that hurts

Collected files are the reason leaving Notion feels hard. They are scattered across pages, they come out of the export with hashed names, and putting them somewhere sensible is genuinely tedious work.

This is the part Stash was built for. You drop the whole export folder in at once, and every file gets read, named for what it contains, and put into a stash. A contract becomes the parties and the date rather than a hash. A scanned receipt becomes the shop and the month.

It also handles the fact that a Notion export is full of duplicates, because the same image often appears in several pages. Identical files are stacked together rather than filed four times.

The first pile depends on what you want

If your notes are genuinely notes, plain Markdown files in a folder, opened with any editor, are hard to beat and will still open in twenty years. Obsidian reads that folder directly if you want backlinks.

If what you liked about Notion was that everything was findable in one place, then the folder of Markdown files will disappoint you, because searching it means remembering roughly where things are.

Stash takes the other approach: you do not arrange anything, you ask for it. Ask reads your library and answers in plain words, with the things it used shown underneath so you can check it. That is closer to what most people wanted from a Notion search box.

A migration that actually finishes

1. Export everything from Notion. Do this even if you are not leaving yet. An export sitting on a drive costs nothing.
2. Unzip it and look at the folder names. Delete whole sections you know are dead.
3. Move the files pile somewhere that names and indexes it.
4. Move the notes pile into plain Markdown, or into whatever you have chosen next.
5. Keep the Notion workspace open for a month. Do not cancel immediately. You will remember something.

The honest version

Most people who leave Notion do not replace it with one thing. They end up with notes in one place and files in another, and they are happier, because the two were never really the same job.

Notion is very good at being a database you can style. It is mediocre at being the place your PDFs live, and that is what most workspaces slowly turn into.

Keep reading

• How to clean up your desktop and have it stay cleanClearing a messy desktop takes an afternoon. Keeping it clear is a different problem, and it is the one worth solving.
• What to do with four thousand screenshotsScreenshots are the easiest thing to make and the hardest thing to find later. Here is why, and what actually helps.
• Why your filing system keeps failingIt is not discipline. It is that every folder structure asks you to make a decision at the worst possible moment.