Moving from Notion to Obsidian Without Losing Your Data

Notion exports a zip of Markdown and CSV. Obsidian reads Markdown. The migration looks trivial and it is not, because the two tools disagree about what a document is.

Notion documents contain databases, relations, rollups, and embeds. Obsidian documents contain text and links. Everything that is not text and links has to be translated, and the translation is lossy in specific, predictable ways.

What survives cleanly

• Headings, paragraphs, lists, quotes. These come through as Markdown.
• Bold, italic, inline code. Preserved.
• Images and files. Downloaded into the export, though with renamed files.
• Page hierarchy. Notion's nested pages become folders and subfolders.

If your Notion use is primarily long-form writing, the migration is close to painless.

What breaks

Internal links. Notion's export writes links as Page Name.md or sometimes URL-encoded strings with spaces. Obsidian resolves [[Page Name]] and it also resolves relative Markdown links, but the filenames in the export rarely match what Obsidian expects. Expect to fix these in bulk.

Databases. A Notion database exports as a CSV, separate from the page that displayed it. The views, filters, sorts, and formulas are gone. If you had a database you actually used as a database, you are not migrating it, you are rebuilding it.

Relations and rollups. Gone entirely. There is no equivalent in a flat file system.

Embeds. Notion embeds of other pages become links at best, plain text at worst. Embedded content from external services becomes a URL.

Callouts and toggles. Rendered as blockquotes or plain paragraphs, depending on the export version. Toggles lose their collapsed state, which for a long page means the export is much longer than what you were reading.

The order of operations

Do not export everything at once. The zip will be large, the cleanup will be overwhelming, and you will abandon the project halfway with your notes split across two tools.

1. Audit before exporting. In Notion, list your pages and mark each one: prose, database, or archive. You will probably find that 70% is prose, 20% is databases you barely use, and 10% is stuff you have not opened in a year.

2. Export prose first. Select the pages that are actually prose, export as Markdown & CSV, and import into a new vault. Fix links. Get this working before touching anything else.

3. Decide about databases deliberately. For each one, choose: rebuild as Markdown tables, keep it in Notion, or delete it. Keeping it in Notion is a legitimate answer and it means you run both tools for a while. That is fine and much better than a rushed rebuild.

4. Leave the archive behind. Old pages you never open are not worth migrating. Export them to a zip, store the zip, move on. Obsidian's search only helps if the vault is not full of noise.

5. Freeze Notion for a month. Do not delete it. Write only in Obsidian for four weeks and see what you miss. If you find yourself going back for a specific database, that is information about what you actually need.

Fixing the links

The fastest approach is a script, not a plugin. Export gives you files named Some Page Name.md. Obsidian wants [[Some Page Name]].

A one-pass regex over the vault handles most of it: find ](Some%20Page%20Name.md) and replace with [[Some Page Name]]. Run it on a copy first.

For the rest, Obsidian's built-in "unresolved links" pane is the cleanup queue. Open it, click through, fix or delete. It is tedious for an hour and then done.

What to rebuild and what to drop

The temptation is to reproduce your Notion system in Obsidian. Resist it. Obsidian has no databases, so a faithful reproduction means Dataview queries and frontmatter that you will maintain forever.

The better question: what did the database actually do for you? If it was a task list, use Todoist. If it was a reading queue, a single Markdown file with a list works. If it was a CRM, it should not have been in Notion in the first place.

Most Notion databases in personal workspaces are elaborate ways of maintaining a list. A list is cheaper.

The one thing that makes Obsidian work

Not the plugins, not the graph. The thing that makes Obsidian useful is that opening it is instant and the files are yours.

That means the migration succeeds when you stop thinking about the migration. Set a rule: for the first month, no plugins, no folder restructuring, no tagging system. Write. If after a month the vault feels like a place you want to be, then invest in structure. If it does not, the problem was never the tool.