The Ultimate Guide to Moving From Evernote to Obsidian | Part 2

[@maks_st]

The current situation with Evernote really demonstrates why it's important to have "files over apps" in the words of Kepano. It further reinforces the case for Obsidian's core principles. I started my transition away from Evernote about a year ago. Initially, I was planning to use Notion, but then found this channel. I remember the moment when I saw the graph view of my notes (mainly Readwise - yes, I am a note-maker, but transitioning to a note-taker) and was immediately sold. It sparked a real joy in me! Thank you, Nick, for opening this amazing world of Linking Your Thinking to me. You are doing an absolutely incredible job!

[@d3j4v00]

I was planning to use Notion but the app showed a blank white screen with no information when i wasn't connected to the internet. Instant Deal-Breaker for my lifestyle. Now i'm addicted to the ease of Obsidian Sync across all my devices and am steadily shifting my entire digital life into the format of local storage synced to other local storage.

[@maks_st]

Obviously, I meant I am a note-taker now, but trying to become a note-maker 🙂 I cannot edit my comment for some reason. And thank you for the pin and like, Nick! 🥳

[@adriancabezas]

Nick I see your effort to connect to your viewers with engaging content. It really shows up here. Personally this is my favorite video you’ve made. Great work!

[@linkingyourthinking]

Oh wow, I'm grateful it stands out. If I may ask, which part made you feel this way the most?

[@edwinjackson9339]

I switched after using Evernote since 2008. About half of my notes (7,500) went into Apple Notes as reference files/archives and the remainder into Obsidian. The change was smoother than expected.

[@linkingyourthinking]

That's a good way to do it...to have something like Apple Notes with the reference files/archives

[@BlairSlavin]

The Scanner option was the best. IT is a fantastic way to import so much paperwork. Especially my parents legal stuff after they passed.

[@deebeecooper8619]

14:11 Yes, I do appreciate this level of granularity (I bought Flight School today,) TIL: I just need to store old Evernote in the attic (it's own vault) & just retrieve what I need & pull over into my Fresh vault.

[@backinhumanform]

Great video Nick. I've been following you on and off for about six months now. You asked for feedback at the end of your video, so here it is. I watched this video because I was interested to hear about Evernote's history. I don't use Evernote much. It's in my plan to start using Obsidian at some point, and I've watched several of your videos extolling its virtues, but setting Obsidian up is not a big thing for me right now. My main feedback is this: at the end of the video, you spoke of your 'secret reason'. "I believe that many of us need a hard reset on our toxic relationship with knowledge. What if ideas just weren't a means to an end, but wholly meaningful on their own? - ideas - thinking - like, what if the journey was emphasized over the destination not in words, but in actions, every day, by honouring the space that you think in, developing there, cultivating ideas, experiencing the sense of intrinsic joy within it." You said more than that but in the interests of brevity, I won't repeat the rest of it here. I've heard you say things like this before, and I've heard similar sentiments expressed by other people. It really strikes a chord with me. And even though I've heard it several times now, it still hasn't sunk in deeply enough. Part of the reason for this is the addictive pull of the internet, pulling me back into the information ocean where I seem to be addicted to drowning. When I feel clogged from too much information, a kind of psychic unwellness, I climb back into videos like these. I'm a singer/songwriter, and I have reams and reams of lyrical snippets. Probably thousands. Whenever I see a line I like, I note it down. I have stored these on paper, in Evernote, in Google Keep, in the notes on my Kindle, but it seems to me that the best place for them all will be in Obsidian, where I am likely to see connections between disparate lyrics that I did not see before. As a songwriter, I often don't know what's on my mind until it presents itself to me. Songwriting has more to do with what wants to be written than what you might think you'd like to write. I believe Obsidian will encourage that creative process, specifically in the way that you recommend. I don't plan to set Obsidian up until I go on a songwriting jag again.

[@linkingyourthinking]

I'm glad this struck a chord and thanks for the thoughts. It's be ready when it's the right time for you

[@tomsop]

Nick, I relate to your story - cannot tell you how many times I have thought I clicked on the record button and after I look at the screen to close the camera I realize I did not record anything - not same situation as your story but same result.

[@radheybinitacreation..9143]

Hello brother I am from India,some thing I know English, your idea very good..I know story and u make a movie but how to possible..very simple u can teach....thank u for all this🙏🙏

[@andyir___]

love this 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

[@graytonw5238]

I think I fall under the category of collector over creator, although I do have a lot of knowledge-base notes. I recently moved all my Evernote notes to OneNote. It's included in my Microsoft 365 account, and for my purposes it's as good as Evernote. I've taken occasional stabs at Joplin, and I may ultimately settle on that since it offers both cost savings and privacy. Obsidian is certainly a force to be reckoned with though.

[@linkingyourthinking]

I like your approach and understanding here. No need to go wild changing things just because others are. OneNote gets you the experience of switching and still maintaining similar functionality, and something like Joplin is a "nice to work to" thing down the road if ever

[@forwardkentucky]

Couple of quick thoughts: -- I’ve made the switch. Took everything out of Evernote; put it in various places depending on its usefulness. (I have an entire folder that is “My Filing Cabinet” for things like receipts and user manuals, mostly in PDF form, and NOT in my Obsidian Vault.) -- Many Obsidian experts / pundits make a point of saying that Obsidian is for your own words, not the words of others. I have a confession to make: My Evernote had a ton of thoughts of others, but most of my own thoughts are already in essays and articles and so on. So, my Obsidian vault is basically empty. How do I start putting stuff in there that is mine? I know that’s a seemingly stupid question, but it is a real one. Do I just pick a topic (like leadership) and randomly enter a bunch of sentences? A lot of what I would enter is stuff I’ve learned from others (books, articles, videos, etc.). What then? Sorry for the exceptionally dumb question, but it has been bugging me for a few weeks now.

[@AmeeliaK]

Don't worry. There are no rules. Just do what's useful for you. Everybody has different needs. I'm not an author, I'm a developer, so my notes are more for remembering stuff than creating stuff. Still it helps to reformulate in my own words to remember it better. When I like the original quote, I'll keep it in the same note, together with my summary. Just start somewhere and grow it like a garden. It will be somewhat chaotic, that's fine. Don't impose too much structure or rules beforehand, it will come automatically.

[@linkingyourthinking]

@@AmeeliaK is right, there is no right way. What I encourage is when you encounter something that sparks, see how quickly you can go from "spark to remark". How can you save what's relevant but also add fast commentary? To goal is to gently improve the habit of context-switching from collecting to consuming and note-taking to note-making by encountering a spark, saying, "That's interesting because," and then saying why :)

[@ServantStatusMinistries]

What I had to do is just start publishing what my older notes were into blogs and as I published I would archive that draft into obsidian and do further linking if I wanted to Make folders like a blog archive with the month and year you posted something be the name of a folder and that’s what’s been working for me

[@bobbyv3]

I hope there's a sequel to the Mr. Rogers Rap from the end of the last video. Lmfao. These are great, Nick. Kudos!

[@StefanSchoch]

Thank you for your insightful comments! One question: what is the beautiful theme you're using in your demonstration?

[@timstringer6384]

Thanks for the video, Nick. It's worth nothing that Evernote has a FREE plan, allowing people to maintain access to their Evernote database without paying a subscription fee. The data can only be accessed on two devices and there are upload limits, but at least the data is still available. It's also worth noting that some Evernote data (e.g. highly-formatted text) doesn't translate very well to Obsidian. Also, some people use Evernote as more of a file repository than a note-taking app. Obsidian is an outstanding app, but I don't think it's well suited to file management. I think it can work well to replace Evernote with a combination of DEVONthink and Obsidian, with DEVONthink serving as a file repository and Obsidian as a note-taking app. Conveniently, DEVONthink can index the Obsidian vault(s).

[@tylermrolfe]

What Obsidian theme is this? Thanks Nick!

[@linkingyourthinking]

Prism, with a few modifications

[@wimclaessen173]

Thanks for all your good work on analysing Evernotes problems, wich I agree with 100%. However, you forgot to mention Obsidians problems when it comes to mobile devices and synchronising them with desktop. After watching your nice last video on how easy it is to import Evernote files into Obsidian, using the new importer plug-in, I decided to give it a try and imported some 800 files, mainly Evernote clippings from magazine articles. I really have a big problem now, syncing on icloud. Obsidian became onworkable on iOS. It crashes, reloads, and takes many minutes before it gets done, and sometimes does not get done at all,. (Nothing wrong with the importer plug-in, it does a 100% perfect job) I believe the Obsidian developers don’t have a good perception of how their users live and work. Obsidian only works well enough with text only or desktop only. But hey, I am not a lone writer, or librarian locked up behind my desk. I am a mobile dynamic person, living in a colourful World, Where text is accompanied by pictures and drawings. (Even medieval monks knew that typography became much more enjoyable when illustrations were added). This is a wakeup call for Obsidian. There is too much focus on the benefits of markup. People don’t care, when speed benefits are lost in syncing delays. And by the way, Evernote is still a great app and since they moved to Europe, are adding lots of improvements. Just check it out. Even the free version is good enough for most. Your adict storage on Evernote does not cost you money for the rest of your life. It is free. I believe Obsidian should pay much more attention to this problem of mobile people. Maybe even slowing syncing of attachments on a “only when needed basis”. My idea would be to store the attachments somewhere in the cloud and to only keep the text markdown files local. Than I can finally start using my iPhone again.

[@linkingyourthinking]

Try this: Open Obsidian on mobile and allow it to fully sync. That should fix the majority of the problem. It sounds like the app needs to download 800+ image-heavy files so it's not going to be immediate, and current Apple limitations (assuming iOS) make it to where Sync only happens when the app is open.

[@CoreyLevine-i4g]

Hey Nick! How did you get the awesome callouts to be foldable within the script!?

[@linkingyourthinking]

change > [!NOTE] to > [!NOTE]-

[@willkennedy9902]

Nick, full discourse, I only listened to the part of your video that discussed why to stay with EN. I thought you would say that a reason would be EN’s search capacity in PDFs and MS Office files? Thoughts?

[@leocarmopereira]

Hey Nick, thanks for the insights! But how long did you take on the 'transfer' phase (around 13:18)? PS - please make an effort to stop shaking the cursor when pointing to an element on screen!

[@linkingyourthinking]

The shaking will continue for accessibility

[@matthiasnott]

Why did you change the filename instead of using properties?

[@roytasker3202]

Just lately Evernote limits you to 100 notes for selection. Very irritating, because it takes so much longer to do the transfer if you have 1000s of notes like I do. Any suggestions?

[@davidgardner9346]

I ran into that same issue following Nick's instructions in the previous video (Part 1). However, in the desktop application, if you view the list of notebooks, there is an option to export an entire "notebook". Mine had ~1300 notes, was much easier.

[@dosto233]

What if we WANT to move to Obsidian but rely on the EN Web Clipper? What’s the best solution for this?

[@forwardkentucky]

Depends on what you are clipping. If just text, copy and paste usually works fairly well. Another tool is Print Friendly, which can create a PDF from pretty much any web page, AND you can edit parts out. Or, you can create a PDF from your browser, with some browsers allowing you to only save the selection.

[@aaaguo6791]

This is not a problem, there are many browser plugins supporting it, and the storage method is optional. It just requires a little learning time.

[@clair_high]

I know this comment is now 6mo old, but I wanted to recommend a specific browser plugin/extension/add-on, Omnivore. It's a read it later type "app" but it has the ability to import cleanly and directly into Obsidian. That Kepano's JavaScript bookmark to clip things are the two I use. I used to use Evernote's web clipper, but it would often keep a lot of stuff I didn't want-a lot of the formatting and extra html stuff.

[@rushi9154]

Problems I face in Obsidian 1. Tables become messy if you have too much information in those tables. 2. Importing files from Evernote is not foolproof. It doesn't import all the files from a notebook

[@dosto233]

Same here; I keep seeing errors about missing files / file locations in migrated notes.

[@linkingyourthinking]

Strange, do you think it's happening on the export or in the import?

[@dosto233]

@@linkingyourthinking I can only assume it’s an import issue; SOME notes with images show the following errors; “../_resources/Picture” is not created yet. Click to create. Then when I do, it appears to create the directory it but images don’t show inline as before. Not sure how to tackle this across hundreds of notes with images. I’ve seen other errors as well.

[@rushi9154]

@@linkingyourthinking It's happening on import

[@quietbydayYT]

6:36 it seems you didn't actually post the link to exporting one's Evernote archive. I'm struggling with this step, as it seems they now limit the number of notes you can export at once... Or maybe they've just made it very harder to navigate.

[@Berniz123]

I switched and commited to learning obsidian. But having ideas and trying to capture it quickly in Obsidian on mobile is very painful. I leaned my vault a lot (took over a minute to load before) and it still takes 5 seconds to load, at which point i might have lost the idea already. Or if I need to grab a quick picture or record a voice, I need to open another app, then find that file and share with obisidian - annoying. They need to improve the mobile app and create a widget for quick capture, i used to use evernote widget to take quick notes and capture pictures multiple times per day before the switch and miss that quickness

[@Ryak1234]

Capture your thoughts in another app. I use Google keep because of voice recognition works in other languages. At the end of the day, I go through and copy paste in Obsidian.

[@matthiasnott]

For your lost recording, any Notability users here? Notability recently lost a lot of my notes, and I'm wondering how to switch. Typically, handwritten notes synched with recorded audio.

[@tylerchasebusiness1001]

So you've updated from ACCESS to ACE? Have you done a video on this? I can't find it if so

[@octavian_2]

Does everyone know what theme is that?

[@linkingyourthinking]

Prism, slightly modified

[@Earl_E_Burd]

Need password-protected sections for private info

[@adrianodwald]

Yeah. Tables are the worst feature in Obsidian. There is no comparison to Evernote or even simple Notion tables. And I don't mean doing it all around with add-ons, just simple tables that are useful and work within notes. Evernote also wins the "Capture" contest. Sending emails and capturing resources from the Internet is gold. Although, not to be outdone - I use Obsidian anyway 😅

[@linkingyourthinking]

Good points!

[@forwardkentucky]

Yes, tables are painful. We also need to be honest with noobies about the way Obsidian handles things like images and documents (link to the item in another folder). Since Obsidian uses text files, that shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, but it was. I wound up doing something different with most of my images and PDFs.

[@clair_high]

Coming back to this, what do you think of the tables functionality, now?

[@adrianodwald]

@@clair_high much much better - it's enough to make powerful notes

[@BlairSlavin]

How many files DIDN"T Evernote Lose of yours????

[@radheybinitacreation..9143]

Brother u know Hindi 🇮🇷