Changing note apps without dragging eight years of clutter along

Export first, and keep the untouched copy

Start with an export from the old application and put it somewhere you will not edit it. Mine was a 1.9 GB ENEX file and a folder of 600 attachments, saved to an external drive with the date and the app version in the folder name. Everything I did after that happened on a copy. When something looked wrong on day three, I could compare against the original instead of wondering whether I had broken it myself.

Do not close the old account yet. I know the temptation; a clean break feels like progress. Keep it alive at least until the sample checks below are done and you have worked in the new place for a couple of weeks. The account costs nothing to leave open and a lot to recreate.

If the archive contains anything confidential, think about where the copy sits before you make it. A shared drive that half the company can browse is not a good place for eight years of personal notes, even temporarily.

Test a sample of six notes, not the whole archive

Before importing 3,400 notes, import six. Pick them on purpose: a plain text note, one with headings and lists, one with a table, one with an inline image, one with a PDF attached, and one with internal links to other notes. If you rely on checklists or code blocks, add one of each. That sample tells you more than any feature list.

Kartoteq accepts Evernote ENEX, Markdown ZIP, and exports from Notion and OneNote, and each import produces a report. Read the report. The absence of an error does not mean every element arrived identical; it means nothing crashed. Those are different statements, and I learned the difference the slow way.

The sample import of six took me about fifteen minutes including the reading. The full import I started before doing that, on day one, took three hours and taught me nothing I could act on. Order matters.

Check meaning, not just appearance

Open each sample note and look at the things that carry meaning: headings, list nesting, table cells, dates, attachment names. Follow one internal link. Open the image. A slightly different font is harmless. A link that now points nowhere, or a table whose columns shifted by one, changes what the note says.

Then search. Pick four distinctive phrases from the old archive and search for them in the new one. In my case, “vendor shortlist 2021” came up immediately, but a phrase I knew was inside a scanned PDF did not, because that PDF had no text layer. The import was fine; the PDF was an image. Knowing that on day two saved me from blaming the wrong thing.

Compare counts last. 3,400 notes out, 3,398 in; the two missing ones were empty notes with no title, and I decided I did not care. Write that down, because in three months you will not remember whether you checked.

Move the live work first, leave the rest in a labeled archive

Create a handful of active notebooks, the ones you need this week, and move only that material into them. For me it was four: a client project, a writing project, the household notebook, and the reading list. Everything else stayed in one imported notebook called “Evernote archive, March”, inside a stack called “Imported”. It is still there. Most of it will never move, and that is correct.

The mistake I made the previous time I switched apps was rebuilding every tag before doing any real work. Two weekends went into a tag taxonomy for notes I had not opened since 2019. Do not do this. Tags are cheap to add later, and the first week of actual use will tell you which five you need.

After a week, write down what was hard to find. Those three or four paths are the ones worth fixing with a rename, a link, or a tag. Then check whether the old application is still receiving edits. If it is, you have two working archives, and that is the real problem, not the import.

A worked example: Anton’s migration inspection note

Anton is moving a design agency’s shared notes out of OneNote. On day one he creates a note called “Migration, inspection” with three headings: Source archive, Sample checks, Outstanding repairs. Under Source archive: the export sits on the office NAS in “onenote-export-2026-03”, it contains 14 sections and 2,100 pages, exported from the desktop app. One line.

Under Sample checks, eight lines, one per sample page: “Client brief, Horizon: headings fine, table lost one column header, fixed by hand.” “Moodboard, spring: 12 of 12 images present.” “Contract notes: internal link to pricing page broken, pricing page itself imported fine.” Under Outstanding repairs, only the things not yet fixed, with the exact page affected, so his colleague Lena can pick one up without asking.

Two weeks later the note has four ticked repairs and one that stays: a page with handwritten ink that arrived as a flat image. Anton decides that is acceptable and writes why. The note then becomes the first entry in “Start here” for the new workspace, because the question “did everything come across?” will be asked again, by someone who was not there.

Decide where edits live, then tell everyone

Once the new application holds the active work, say out loud where new edits belong. For a solo archive that is a note to yourself. For a team it is a message with a date: “From Monday, project notes live in Kartoteq; OneNote stays readable until June and then goes read-only.” Without that sentence, two people will keep editing the same brief in two places, and no importer will ever reconcile that for you.

Keep the old account around for reference, but treat exactly one place as the working record. I kept my old account for four months and opened it twice. Both times to check something I should have copied into the inspection note.

The honest summary of my own migration: about 300 of 3,400 notes were worth the trouble, the rest are a searchable archive I rarely open, and the only part I would do differently is the order. Sample first, inspection note second, full import third. The clutter does not need to move with you. It just needs to be findable if you ever ask.

Where to go next

Find it again in a year

Learning and research: from sixty saved papers to one argument