Why would you store all of this valuable information in a proprietary tool? What happens when notion shuts down, jacks up prices, makes feature changes you don't like, etc etc? Make some attempt to migrate all this data? It's gonna be hard to do this in an automated way, if they even have an (export) api for this.
I'm using (vim)wiki/gollum and I feel much safer about my data.
Obviously, you have a point. I am indeed a little bit worried.
Some things that ease my mind:
Notion's export and backup features are quite good. You can export everything in various formats, markdown being the most relevant for me.
This only becomes messy with complex databases that use formulas and are related to each other. You would not have these with local solutions in the first place.
Notion is already profitable and growing rapidly, I do not see them shutting down in the foreseeable future.
However, the other concerns are relevant.
The API is supposed to be released soon.
I intend to either build a backup workflow myself or use other tools that will get developed then.
Have you actually done an export of your Notion workspace?
I looked at their options before using Notion and was happy they had a full export available - but then I actually went ahead and used it because they are putting zero focus into improving the performance of the apps - and the export format is a horrific mess!
They split out code blocks from your notes in separate notes, the filenames are a mess and images aren't saved inline (as they could be with something like base64).
For workspaces of any reasonable size, you're going to be doing a lot of work to make the export actually useful outside the context of Notion - which should be obvious given how they treat things as blocks (and all the abstractions that come with that make it into their underlying data structures)
They've also been saying the "API is coming soon" for about a year now.
Never used notion, but personally I'd prefer a machine readable and raw export, at least you can assemble your stuff back in any way you prefer. More annoying when you have to scrape data you're interested in from htmls.
But yeah, lack of API is a major problem, and main reason I haven't even considered trying it yet.
I think Markdown does qualify as machine-readable. There are very good libraries to do all kinds of things with it.
Edit: I guess you meant human-readable as opposed to things like base64, and not as a critique against Markdown.
By now, there are several unofficial APIs at least, for read-access they are quite good apparently, did not yet use one myself though. E.g. https://github.com/kjk/notionapi
I have not yet done a complete export of my workspace. I do however often export specific databases, notes, etc.
My post describes how I use it to draft my blog posts, where I also use the Markdown export feature. The code blocks are fine and within the same file, so I am not sure what you mean there.
Images are not ideal, but I don't know how it could be done much better. Everything is exported into a .zip and the images are also there.
Admittedly, my long term hope for a reliable and automated way of backing up everything relies on the API. Their promise that it will be released soon is a little awkward by now, but I am sure that it will come eventually. I don't think its true that it is already a year since they first said it would be here soon.
Fully agree. I was turned off notion for the same reason and reverted back to self-hosting dokuwiki. A much more limited feature set, to be sure, but at least I'll still have my notes 10 years from now.
