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People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

technologyreview.com

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Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#13

Post by have_faith »

I started doing this for a while but quickly switched to Obsidian. Obviously it doesn't have the same features but it serves the same purpose for me at least. The data format is much simpler and portable too, I just store the vault in iCloud and sync it to my phone.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#14

Post by geraltofrivia »

HPsquared wrote: post #5
mtsolitary wrote: post #4

Are these people not worried about storing their entire lives in some SaaS company's proprietary format on their cloud servers?

I wonder if they offer an option to export the data in some usable format.

It's not the most intuitive export (since there are backlinks, complex hierarchy, databases and all that jazz in Notion pages) but they do return Markdown for every page, CSV for databases (with some information loss), maintain folder structures, and multimedia attachments.

A quick search shows me that Notion exports can be used to populate Obsidian [1] (which implies that there's not substantial information loss).

[1] - https://forum.obsidian.md/t/notion-2-obsidian-migration-inst...

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#15

Post by corobo »

PradeetPatel wrote: post #6
HPsquared wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if they offer an option to export the data in some usable format.

Unless there's a tangible monetary benefit in doing so, I don't see why that would be a good business decision. It is likely that there will be some use cases for power users, however one must justify the development and opportunity costs associated with that.

Seems like they do from a quick googlin'

https://www.notion.so/help/export-your-content

https://www.notion.so/help/back-up-your-data

> one must justify the development and opportunity costs

GDPR

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#18

Post by anonzzzies »

have_faith wrote: post #13

I started doing this for a while but quickly switched to Obsidian. Obviously it doesn't have the same features but it serves the same purpose for me at least. The data format is much simpler and portable too, I just store the vault in iCloud and sync it to my phone.

I similarly moved from Notion to Joplin. My data, my server etc. For me the move was triggered by Notion being very slow, but later on, with the amounts of data I had in Notion, I started to worry about privacy etc as well.

Re: People who use Notion to plan their whole lives

#19

Post by geraltofrivia »

have_faith wrote: post #13

I started doing this for a while but quickly switched to Obsidian. Obviously it doesn't have the same features but it serves the same purpose for me at least. The data format is much simpler and portable too, I just store the vault in iCloud and sync it to my phone.

Obsidian is great. My notetaking solutions went from

- raw text files

- raw markdown files

- + homemade server rendering the markdown live

- Obsidian

- Notion

I stick with Notion because it really is infinitely configurable. I rarely use 99% of the plugins but I have, in the past, used their API to populate the show the results of my experiments straight from my Python code to a Notion Table. Super convenient. I take regular (every six months or so) hard exports that I save to disk in case the company goes belly up tomorrow. I'm comfortable with it.

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