Import
Bring a vault in from Obsidian, Notion or a folder of Markdown — and see exactly what did not come.
What you can import
| Source | Comes through |
|---|---|
| Obsidian | a vault directory or a zip: notes, wikilinks, frontmatter, attachments, canvases |
| Notion | the Markdown & CSV export: pages, and databases as typed notes |
| Markdown | any folder, with or without frontmatter |
| CSV | Notion database CSVs, inside a Notion export |
Wikilinks are resolved to real edges. Block identifiers are minted during the import and reused if the import is retried, so a link written by the first attempt is never orphaned by the second.
The ledger is the product
Every import produces a row for every item the archive contained, whatever happened to it — and every skip carries a reason.
| Reason | Means |
|---|---|
encrypted_note | we cannot read it, and will not guess |
unsupported_attachment | the file type is not one we store |
database_view | a saved view, not content |
path_too_long | a linked page’s path is over the Windows 260-character limit, so the export is missing it; or a file’s own path is over 4,096 characters or 256 levels deep, so it was not read |
unresolved_wikilink | the link had no target in the archive |
ambiguous_wikilink | more than one target matched |
comments_not_in_export | Notion comments are not imported; the Markdown & CSV export does not carry them |
parse_error | the file was not what its extension claimed |
Links are reported per target, not per occurrence. A note gets one row for each distinct target it could not link to, up to 100, and past that a single row saying how many more links went unresolved. A note that links to the same missing page two thousand times has one row for it, not two thousand. An import lists at most 10,000 rows about links in all. Past that, a note’s link rows are left out whole, and one final row says how many were left out and from how many notes. The row for each item the archive contained is always listed.
“We imported 4,812 of 5,003 notes, and here is each of the 191 we did not” is the difference between a trustworthy import and a black box. “Expect some failed imports”, with no reason per item, is the bar this clears.
While it runs
Notes become readable as they land rather than at the end, and an import can be canceled without losing what has already committed. Search over the imported vault becomes useful before the import finishes.