Last week I finally dragged myself to start using Notion, and so far it’s been amazing. Probably going to be some future posts on how I end up using, especially with teaching. But since it’s so customizable, I haven’t quite settled on a best method for me yet.
That’s not why this post is here though. I’m a touch on the paranoid side and wanted to make sure I could download my content from their servers as a backup before I put too much stuff online. Fortunately, it’s really easy to export and get all of your data as a mix of markdown and CSV files. There are other options too, but that’s the one that made the most sense for me.
To create the backup, click on Settings & Members and then the Settings tab. You should see an option to export your workspace content. Click that and it’ll create a zip file for you to download and also email you when it’s done in case you don’t want to sit and wait.
But after I did that I wasn’t able to unzip the file. Windows told me the file was invalid.
Google and Reddit to the rescue. The issue was that the filenames that Notion uses are relatively long and the default Windows unzipping program doesn’t handle that very well.
And now, 7-Zip to the rescue. I already had it installed, but if you don’t just head over to their site to download. The export zip opened up without a hitch and everything was good.
Next step is figuring out how to automate backups so I don’t have to go and click the button. Haven’t come up with a good way to do that, but I’m going to give it a shot.
