Switching from Roam to Obsidian

One potential stumbling block is with daily notes. In Roam, the format is “November 27th, 2020”. In Obsidian, the default format is “2020-11-27”, although you can tweak the format for new daily notes to whatever you want. Note, however, that Obsidian cannot batch-rename existing daily notes. (I have some posts where I figured out how to rename existing daily notes to a new format using regex.)

In the short term, the easiest approach might be to leave the daily notes as they are and tell Obsidian to use that format for new daily notes. This will also preserve existing links to daily notes. Bear in mind, however, that daily notes are not automatically sorted by date, so, in the long term, using a format like “2020-11-27” can be useful for sorting purposes. Also, I would recommend putting all daily notes in a folder and updating your daily note settings accordingly.

For me, the transfer took some time but has been worth it. My guess is that importing will become easier over time, but if you have the opportunity to start out in Obsidian, that would probably save time.

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