Export your data

Before you start

• A signed-in account with an active subscription.

Steps

1. Open Account and find Your data

   It is the last section before the Phone divider. Two links: Download my data for the writing, Download my files for the attachments.

2. Click it

   The browser downloads a JSON file. There is no progress bar and nothing to wait for on our side — it is an ordinary download, and if it fails your browser says so in its own words.

3. Read what is in it

   The file leads with a format version, then your tags, then your items oldest-first. Each item carries its tags twice — by id, and by name, because an id means nothing outside the account it came from and an export is read somewhere else by definition.

   Archived items are in it. An export is an archive, so it reads chronologically rather than in the board’s pinned-first order.

4. Take the files too, if you have any

   Download my files hands you a zip: a folder per files item, named for its title, holding the attachments under the names you uploaded them with. Archived items are in it.

   The zip starts downloading immediately and is built as it is sent, so a large sack shows a download that grows rather than a wait followed by a file. There is nothing to resume if it is interrupted — start it again.

What happens next

• Notes and checklists are in the file, with their titles, bodies, rows, tags and dates.
• Secrets are not. The whole premise of that kind is that a body leaves one reveal at a time — a bulk file of them is the thing it exists to prevent.
• File attachments are not in the JSON — it could only carry their names, not the bytes. They are in the zip instead.
• The zip carries a manifest.json listing every item, its real title, and every attachment with the path it was written to. Folder and file names are tidied to something every computer will accept, so the manifest is where the originals are.
• The JSON names the kinds it includes, so a reader can tell “this export left it out” from “you had none of those”.

If something goes wrong

Each row is what you see on screen. Symptoms are worded the way the app words them, so the sentence in front of you should be findable on this page.

The download did nothing

A pop-up or download blocker is the usual cause, since this is a plain link rather than a button that fetches. Allow downloads for the site and click again.

Your secrets are missing from it

Deliberate, and not a setting. Reveal the ones you want and copy them out by hand.

Your files are missing from the JSON

Deliberate — use Download my files for those. One attachment at a time still works too: open its card and download it there.

A file you expected is not in the zip

Check manifest.json. An attachment listed there with no path is one whose stored copy we could not find, which is worth telling us about. Anything not listed at all was never on a files item.

You want to import it back, or into another app

There is no importer today, in either direction. The format version at the top of the file exists so that one written later can tell what it is reading.

A tag id on an item is not in the tags list

The tag was deleted after the item was filed under it. The names list drops it rather than carrying a blank.

Next

• Your subscription — What you are paying, when the period ends, how to change a card and how to cancel.
• Secrets — For the handful of notes that are a door code or a recovery key. The body is stored encrypted and shown one at a time.
• Attach files to an item — Up to ten files on a card, ten megabytes each. Uploads happen on save, and editing replaces the whole set.
• Pin, archive and delete — Three different ways of getting something out of your way, only one of which is permanent.

Still stuck? Email [email protected] and tell us what the screen said. All the help articles are at Help.