I have 5,000 plus notes in my Evernote account. Some date back to 2013.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard about Roam Research – a new note taking application. It immediately made sense to me. The backlinking between notes was seamless and incredibly powerful. The lack of interlinking between notes has always bugged me about Evernote.
Since Roam is relatively new, they do not have an Evernote migration tool.
I’ve seen several others suggest moving notes over manually. They use the time to audit their note database and only move over the notes that matter.
I wanted to move all of my notes to use Roam’s “Unlinked References” feature that pulls in notes that share a page’s title. I wanted Roam’s feature to do the heavy lifting for me over time instead of me spending hours skimming my thousands of notes.
While Roam does not have an Evernote migration tool – Notion does. And it’s really easy!
Here’s how
Start a free trial of Notion here: https://www.notion.so/
Click Import in the left sidebar and select Evernote.
Select the folders that you want to import into Notion.
The import only takes a couple of minutes depending on the size of your account.
After your import has completed, navigate to a page in your Notion account that was a folder in Evernote. Click the three dots in the top right corner of your account and click Export.
Make sure Markdown & CSV is selected from the dropdown and toggle to include subpages before clicking Export.
Notion will zip up your notes and images then download them to your computer. Now, you can import your notes as Markdown files into Roam.
Open a free Roam account here: https://roamresearch.com/
Open your Roam account and click the three dots in the top right corner of your account. Click Import Files from the drop down. Roam will ask you to select the Markdown files from your computer. Roam gives you the opportunity to update the file names before completing the import.
What about the images
Notion exports the images in separate folders. My workaround is to create a file in Roam called “Evernote Images” and dump all of my images there. As I encounter a broken link in a note, I can visit this file to find the missing image.
I don’t believe I’ll need to open my Evernote application again.
The entire process took less than an hour to complete.
Do you prefer video? Check out the below.
Not sold on Roam?
Check out Nat Eliason’s article on Roam. Conor and the Roam team have excellent help articles on the Roam help database.