Import from Notesnook

Export your notes

1. Open Notesnook and go to Settings > Backup & export.
2. Find "Export all notes" and open the "Export as" dropdown.
3. Pick HTML. This matters: it is the only format Notesnook writes without first stripping your formatting.
4. Notesnook saves a single .zip containing one file per note plus an attachments folder. That zip is your import file.

Pick HTML, not Markdown

Notesnook's export dropdown offers Text, Markdown, Markdown + Frontmatter, and HTML. Only HTML keeps everything.

Both Markdown options flatten your notes before writing them: underline, font sizes, and text alignment are gone before the file ever reaches us. The plain Markdown option also writes no tags and no original dates, so every imported note would be untagged and stamped with today's date. We still accept both, and we will tell you what was lost, but HTML is the one to choose.

The Text export has no structure to read and is not accepted.

What comes along

Your notebooks are rebuilt as real folders, not flattened into tags. A note in Work > Projects lands in a Work > Projects folder, nested up to three levels deep. Notesnook lets you nest notebooks deeper than that, so anything past the third level attaches to the deepest folder and keeps the extra levels as tags. No note loses its place.

Pinned and favorited notes stay marked. Notesnook keeps Pin and Favorite as two separate properties; PrivacyNotes has a single Pinned list, so a note that was either one lands there.

Notesnook supports a few things we do not: custom fonts, font sizes, and text alignment are dropped, and the text they were applied to is kept. Highlighted text becomes bold and the source of any math block is kept as a code block.

A backup file is not an export

Notesnook can also save a backup file ending in .nnbackupz. That is a different thing: it stores every attachment in Notesnook's own encrypted format, which only Notesnook can unpack. Drop one here and we will say so rather than importing half of it. Use "Export all notes" as HTML instead.

Import into PrivacyNotes

1. Open PrivacyNotes and go to Settings > Import & Export.
2. Pick Notesnook as the source.
3. Drop in the file you just exported (or click to browse) and start the import.
4. Imported notes arrive tagged with their source, so you can review or bulk-edit the whole batch afterwards.