No…I’m not looking to leave Agenda now. However, my experience with leaving Evernote has me very conscious of planning for an unexpected future.
With that in mind, is there some method that will export all of the data from Agenda and retain all of the meta data (as much as humanly possible)? Evernote’s export was decent until I hit large notebooks. Then it ground to a halt with issues. For example, one of my notebooks needed to be broken into about ten chunks of data. If the export process halts, then you do not have a way to resume it or to know what files were processed and which were not. So…you start all over. After multiple start/stops, I’m still not through it. So I’ve got to come up with work-arounds.
So…I’m curious what the process will look like for Agenda. I hope that we don’t go one by one and export the files. I searched the forum, but didn’t find the answer. Can somone point out whatever I missed?
For retaining as much data as possible, the Agenda file format is best. The downside is that it will not be importable by any other app. This is the problem you have with migrating: a file format.
I think markdown is probably most versatile, but you lose a lot of metadata, and even attachments. Using the TextBundle format, which is a markdown file with attachments, you can certainly move to many apps, though not all.
We don’t have an “export whole library” option, but you can do it by selecting multiple projects at a time, and exporting those. I think you could do this pretty quickly, just working through your categories.
It is also possible just to expand your categories, and then select all the projects. Perhaps you can even export in one hit.
In any case, with a bit of patience, you can certainly get your data out of the app.
Thanks for the post. Yes, there will always be issues moving from one app to another…not that I’m looking to do that today.
I think that perhaps this is one of those areas where generative AI will come in to help. I can see a third-party tool that can analyze a file format (e.g. an Agenda file export), analyze it and sort it with the user’s end goals in mind, then output a file or do a direct insertion for the new app and make the most of whatever metadata is available provided the new app supports it. Time will tell. I can say that I’ve been using ChatGPT’s Advanced Data Analysis tool to process data for moving/cleaning data for processing in other accounts.
I would run an Agenda file through it, but it does not support those file formats. I think it will take a someone to create needed file format importers.
An Agenda file is just a zip archive, with the attachments, and a JSON file for structure. If you unzip it, you can process it OK I think.
Even if you have a tool to convert, one of the bigger problems is just that different tools support different features sets. Eg. we concentrate on dates for each note, and most note taking tools don’t have a concept of a note’s “relevance” date (different to the creation or modification date).
After spending a lot of time with ChatGPT 4+ and previous versions, I think that generative AI, properly trained and tuned will be a huge leap in information portability. Its ability to read, understand, and manipulate data is amazing. In the next week or two, I’m going to play with an Agenda file. I should be able to use it to massage the data into whatever format is needed to jump to another structure…the converse also being true. Maybe you guys should explore using a language model to make it easy to move whatever data a user wants into Agenda. I’ll bet that it will give you monetized returns in some fashion.
Along that same line, it looks like Apple will be making Shortcuts more powerful and accessible to its own language model. Take a look at this X-tweet:
This looks very exciting and promising. I think that 2024 will be a year of huge API momentum. I am hoping that this is the beginning of real intelligent assistance for the masses.
We’re indeed very curious as to what Apple will do in this arena, especially whether they will make LLM’s available on-device, which will open up a lot of opportunities within Agenda.