I have been an Evernote user for years and have thousands of notes, including in some cases text formatting (e.g., bold, highlighting, font colours) and attachments or non-text files (e.g., an embedded image, a PDF file).
I’ve tried in the past to migrate from Evernote to Obsidian, but I’ve never quite managed it. As Obsidian evolves, it’s added a lot of the functionality I was missing (most notably a way to get material from Readwise) but the biggest cost of switching for me right now is how onerous it is to get things from Evernote to Obsidian without losing a lot of information. This seems to be an issue with Evernote, who is no doubt invested in making it difficult for its users to switch to alternatives.
I did some quick searching on the Forum but most of the discussions are a bit dated so I thought I’d ask: are there any relatively painless, low-effort ways to migrate my Evernote data to Obsidian?
I’ve not had much luck with Yarle or with the Evernote-to-Joplin-to-Obsidian methods I’ve found; they notes always end up losing formatting or getting disorganized in some way (though that could be user error).
Well, for the Readwise portion of it. Do you still have an active Readwise account? Are you aware there is a Readwise plugin for Obsidian? So it could pull all your notes directly from Readwise.
That might reduce the amount of notes you have to clean up. Just pull them in to Obsidian, and delete the ones in Obsidian. (Assuming you didn’t do much manual appending/editing to your Readwise notes.)
Otherwise sorry, I’m not sure. I exported my Evernote data long ago, and just cleaned up a lot of it myself. A lot of it was just junk I didn’t need too.
An alternative might be to consider how Tiago Forte suggests using “just-in-time” management. He covered the use case of transferring all your files from one platform to another. This is just something to consider:
Move all your Evernote data into a messy pile on your filesystem somewhere.
Go through it, and find the important stuff you want.
Manually copy it over into Obsidian slowly, over time. Do a little bit here and there.
The important stuff will get moved. The stuff you honestly didn’t need…? well it might sit there for a few months or years. It’s not lost. But you don’t need to worry about managing it until the need arises.
Depending on your use case, that might be a bad idea. But it might also give you the chance to reorganize and refresh yourself with a lot of old lost ideas. And repair loose connections in new ways.
(And don’t forget to use the delete button sometimes! Storage can have a psychic cost.)
I managed to get everything out by exporting to ENEX, importing into Joplin, and then exporting from Joplin into MD. This was fine for text-based notes, but things like PDFs or embedded images didn’t make the trip quite so well. But, it’s good enough for me for now and a step toward freeing myself from Evernote.
I’m afraid it’s been a while so I don’t quite remember! I remember trying it and struggling but can’t recall the details. It was more than likely user error to be honest.
Thanks very much for your efforts on this