A year or two ago, I switched from Obsidian back into Notion. It wasn’t an easy decision – Obsidian is a phenomenal tool – Notion just worked better for me as a task manager and multi-purpose second brain. Since moving out, though, I’ve always felt a bit of a phantom limb sensation. Notion’s backlinks system is pretty good, and I’ve written plenty about how I utilize it in my Second Brain, but it lacked some of Obsidian’s sophistication. The graph view is something I always found very enticing, a quick visual representation of the way all my ideas were connected, and which ideas acted as hubs. It also just looked really cool. More ways to interact with and query backlinks is something I dearly want from Notion, but in the meantime, I’ve found a pretty manageable integration with Obsidian!
Upon realizing that I could export all of my Notion data as a markdown file, it made me think – maybe I could get the best of both worlds? I set about using Notion’s “Export to Markdown & CSV” functionality to grab a big pile of all of my Notion notes in Markdown format, which Obsidian uses… And when I opened up that export folder vault in Obsidian, to my great delight, I was greeted with an intact graph view, right out the gate. It seems like Notion exports backlinks into Markdown in an appropriate format for Obsidian to read. One imperfection is that the Markdown filenames contain the Notion database URL, which tends to make them a little ugly, but it still gives you access to Obsidian’s frankly superior backlinks system.
My suspicion is that because the Markdown export also includes a list of your Notion fields at the top, a clever Obsidianeer could use a plugin to make this even more sophisticated. I get a sense that it’d play well with Obsidian’s “Dataview” plugin, but I’m not well-versed in how to use it. Food for thought!
Here’s what one page looks like in Notion:
And here’s what it looks like in Obsidian:
My current method is to use Notion’s “Export as Markdown” function within the browser, and then unzip that zip file into a folder I titled “Notion” within my Obsidian folder. Say “Yes to all” when asked if you’d like to overwrite all the previous files, and there you have it, a fresh export of your Notion notes into Obsidian for very little manual work.
I’d love to find a way to quickly automate backups into Markdown format using Notion’s API. One tutorial I’ve found for automated backups is here, but regrettably these backups save the data in JSON format, which isn’t what we want in this case. Their paid plan says that they have Markdown backups on the way, so perhaps in the future there will be an option there, or someone more clever than me will make an open source code to automatically download Markdown files. If anyone knows a way, I’d be delighted if you let me know in the comments!
