Organized markdown exports, not just backups
Devon Meadows
I appreciate that your team put together a markdown backup but it does feel like a backup focused on getting data back into Reflect, not an export focused on me having an organized properly formatted personal record. These files can really just get pulled back into reflect and it’s a huge bucket of reflect formatted files.
I would really love to see an organized, comprehensive, and local-first approach to exporting my data. An export should be clean and easy for me to browse through on my computer.
There should be no backlinks to reflect URLs. Instead the backlinks should point ONLY to filenames.
The Backlinks in the export currently are just reflect hyperlinks. This would only be helpful in reflect so it is not future proof and local first. It is reflect-first.
I plan on using reflect for a long time but realistically when I am assessing a tool I pay close attention to these types of features.
I want to feel like I’m not trapped here. I want to feel like the more data I feed this app, the more intelligent my universal file base is getting. I don’t want to feel like I am becoming more and more dependent on Reflect.
Id really like to see more rich export that shows not reflect URLs but references to other Note titles so this would be simpler to move somewhere else.
Maybe it’s a checkbox on export for “strip reflect URLs from export”. Maybe you have two separate things for two use cases - Export & Backup. I just hope to see the Reflect team take the user-centered approach to data exports and not a Reflect-centered approach.
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Richard Sachs
A portable markdown export is an important feature for me.
I love the UI, features, and flow of Reflect. I like that it's all bundled together nicely so I don't have to waste time experimenting with something like Obsidian plugins that may or may not work the way I want them to.
Reflect's developers have put a lot of thought and effort into building a polished product, and I'd like to keep using it.
However, I can't shake this anxiety about the lack of a more portable markdown version of my data - especially if something were to happen to Reflect in the future.
I find I'm questioning whether to stick with Reflect or switch back to something like Obsidian for portability reasons. If I do, it won't be the lack of features; it would be nervousness about data portability.
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Vibhuti
Glad I came across this and all the thoughtful responses. Upvote complete.
Liam Darmody
For the sake of portability, I really like that Reflects supports Markdown Export. Having tried the Markdown ZIP export feature yesterday, it appears to have gotten better since this feature request was first raised. However, all markdown files are exported into a single folder and the names of each Daily Note file use the following naming convention: Tue, March 21st, 2023. Unfortunately, this makes organisation of markdown files really challenging. I'd like to make a suggestion to improve this.
When exporting my notes in a Markdown ZIP, I would like the Daily Notes to be saved in their own folder with the following naming convention: yyyy-mm-dd
Tony
Agree, it's shows good company culture to allow allow portable export formats
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Bo Arfai
Agree! Data portability should be a top priority
Bruno Llerena
Agree, upvoting!
Edward Croft
I 100% agree with this. Internal "reflect" links in the markdown exports are not usable by any other application, and make readability hard in text editors.
To be clear, I've been a hardcore Obsidian user for the last 18 months. And while I've "loved" it... I find the UX a continuing challenge to attaining "flow".
What I'd like is inter-operability between applications. I will probably continue to use Obsidian, although if Reflect continues on this terrific path I can see myself migrating everything into Reflect. I've only used Reflect for the last week and am hooked. Design matters.
But either way, I do think that you should provide the option to export links in a non-proprietary fashion. e.g. e.g. the option to export as [[link]] with purely the name of the file within it. I appreciate that's also non standard markdown, but at least it's pretty standard across backlink/graph note applications.
Fritz Hubig
Upvote
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Mateo Allen
upvoting!!