Fourteen years ago I discovered Evernote, the note taking app. It was one of the first apps on my first iPad. Back then it was the very cool note taking app everyone was using.

In 2016 they started asking to pay a subscription. As someone who leaned more and more on this app that wasn’t unreasonable. I’m okay if that supports the development teams making the app better. In 2022 Evernote was bought by Bending Spoons, a company sometimes called the place where apps come to die. Development continued, but the keyword was “AI”. Sometimes useful, but I like to write my own notes, thank you.

Evernote became central for a lot of things in my life: all my notes for my astronomy and space podcast were stored in Evernote notebooks. My todo lists, links to interesting articles on data engineering and AI and upcoming purchases.

And then last week I got mail from Evernote. the subscription price is going to be .. doubled! Look, I might be very much locked-in into Evernote. But I’m not crazy. It was the kick in the pants I needed to move away.

One update on this: as soon as you start cancelling your plan, and unlink your devices, this message appears:

If you don’t want to move, this would be a thing to check.

The alternatives

It wasn’t the first time I was on the lookout for alternatives. I’ve heard good things from users of other note taking apps, like Notion.

But now that I felt the need to switch, it was time to think about the requirements. What did I want from a new note taking app?

• It should be able to support migration from Evernote to the new platform.
• The app should work on all my devices: MacOS, iOS and Windows. Synchronisation between devices should be pretty quick.
• My notes are usually pretty basic text. Most of it is links to articles. Sometimes I add some images. But I don’t have very specific requirements beyond that.
• Pasting without formatting as an option would be a plus. (So often I find myself copying text with a simple text editor as in between step to remove formatting. Why does most software assume I want formatting copied without giving alternatives?)
• Backup is pretty important. I don’t want to lose notes.
• Open source would be a plus.
• My notes should stay private. No US cloud act should be able to influence that. 

What are the alternatives? There are:

• Microsoft Notes
• Notion
• Obsidian 
• Joplin

There are more, but these are the ones I’ve looked at. Microsoft Notes is free, but I’m not so sure about privacy. Notion is also US based. Obsidian is Canadian and Joplin is French. Both have apps on all my devices. Both are formatted as markdown. Both are open source. Both promise pretty good privacy.

So it went between Obsidian and Joplin. I’ve browsed the app reviews. Both score pretty good. I didn’t have a lot of time to do a deep dive in both products.

What I liked about Obsidian is the end-to-end encryption and the ability to pick a location of your encrypted vault. So I chose to try Obsidian first.

Obsidian

First you have to install Obsidian, obviously. There are installation files/apps for MacOS, iOS and Windows. (Also Linux)

Vaults

Next you have to create a vault (or “kluis” in Dutch). This basically is a directory where your markdown notes end up.

But there are two types of vaults: local vaults and synced vaults. You want to create a synced vault if you want to share your notes across devices.

Obsidian subscriptions

For this you need an Obsidian Sync subscription. You can do this even for free for a year, provided you stay within 1 GB storage. I’m way beyond that. So I took a Sync Plus plan with 10 GB storage. That’s $4 per month, billed annually. 

There’s also a Publish subscription. I thought this would be some kind of upgrade on top of a Sync subscription. It doesn’t. Publish doesn’t have sync capabilities. So go for Sync or Sync Plus.

Once you’ve done that, you need to turn on the internal plugin Synchronisation. And then create a synced vault.

Migration from Evernote to Obsidian

Migrating from Evernote to Obsidian is actually quite easy. Go to a notebook in Evernote. Right click, choose Export notebook. Now you have a .enex file.

In Obsidian you need to install an external plugin (turn on community plugins) and install the Importer plugin. In the Importer plugin you can choose the file format Evernote, pick the .enex file, choose a path (in your vault) and start the import. From there you probably want to move the imported directory to a structure of your choice.

There are some limitations to what you can import. In Evernote you can basically paste any document in a note. Sometimes that’s easy to move a Powerpoint or PDF between devices. Out of the box Obsidian doesn’t do PDF or Powerpoint. So these will not appear in your Obsidian vault.

Importing my Evernote notebooks went without as much as a hitch. I have already migrated everything I want. The imported notebooks wil end up in the assigned directory. From there I’ve moved my notebooks to Obsidian’s directory structure.

The explorer

On my MacOS creating, moving and removing notes and directories is pretty easy, I can just drag and drop stuff here and there. It’s actually easier than in Evernote.

The structure of the Obsidian app is a little different from the Evernote app. Obsidian also has a kind of directory structure. But the note order is alphabetised where in Evernote they were ordered by the last time you edited them. My way of working with these notes is I have a monthly note for 4 topics: Todo, IT, Moon and Planets and Miscellaneous. At the start of each month I create a new version of these notes based on a template. When I do this in Obsidian, my newest note would go all the way down the list. Meaning, I have to scroll, scroll, scroll to the Moon and Planets note for this month. (I have 10 years of monthly Moon and Planets notes. Do the math.)

Now I’m sure there is some kind of setting where I can change this, but I decided to make it a much easier process: I put the notes of this month in the root. At the start of the next month, I’ll just create a new note and move the notes from last month in their respective directories.

Editing

Obsidian has a Markdown format for notes. So I guess I’m going to be better at Markdown in the near future.

There were some things I had to change. For example, I had in-document links to chapters in the same document that, migrated from Evernote, didn’t work anymore. But this actually works way better than in Evernote. Because every time I created a new note from a template in Evernote, I had to change the hyperlinks, or they would point to the template instead of the new note. In Markdown I can actually point to the chapter in the same file and copy this table of contents to other notes and, as long as you have the same chapters over there, they immediately work.

Another thing that worked differently, was my todo list. I never wanted to use Evernote’s checkmarks. I have my own system. It’s as stupidly simple as can be. And I like to keep it that way. This system works for me.

My todo list is all text. Every line starts with either with “o” for items I haven’t started, “>” for items I’m working on, “W” for waiting and “V” for finished. (Below the todo there are chapters for Done and Not done, where I move tasks that are either finished or won’t be done.)

But in Markdown > means some kind of formatting. So I now know I need to put a \ in front of that. Then it’s all good.

Backups

Obsidian says on their site that “syncing is no backup”. I agree. So how to do a proper backup? There is an external plugin that is called Local Backup. I have pointed it to a directory on my NAS. From the settings I see it runs 3 times per day. Run it manually and you’ll see a .zip file appear in your backup directory.

That’s it so far

I’ve migrated to Obsidian 2 days ago and migrated the last notebook yesterday. I have to say that it works pretty well. I’m now sure I can end the Evernote subscription in time before they bill me again.

Now that I have migrated everything, I realise there’s a lot of history in there. And it isn’t always categorised in the most obvious way. But since it’s easier in Obsidian, it’s easy to set that right.

There’s a lot more to Obsidian that I have to find out. There are graph representations of your documents that I don’t know yet how to use best. There are many plugins with loads of possibilities. The Obsidian adventure has just started.