Your notes were always yours. Now they're Markdown too.

Every notes app says your data is yours. Most of them mean it in the way a hotel means the towels are yours: technically true, awkward in practice, and nobody is going to help you carry them.

Harbor has always had a real door out — a full account export, no fee, no throttle, working even if you stop paying. Today it has a third format, and it’s the one that changes the shape of the promise.

You can now export your notes as Markdown. And Harbor imports that same export back in.

What you get

Unzip a Markdown export and you’re looking at a folder per notebook, one .md per note, and every attachment sitting once in a files folder at the top:

manifest.json
Boatyard Reference/Mangrove Belle — hull survey.md
Boatyard Reference/Winter haul-out checklist.md
Recipes & Kitchen/Sourdough, third attempt.md
files/hull-survey-2026.pdf
files/port-chine.jpg

That is not “Markdown-ish.” That is an Obsidian vault. Point Obsidian at the unzipped folder and it opens — no conversion, no importer, no plugin.

Here’s a real note out of one:

---
title: "Mangrove Belle — hull survey"
tags: ["boatyard", "survey"]
created: 2025-08-20T00:00:00Z
updated: 2025-08-20T01:00:00Z
source: "https://example.com/survey-standards"
---

## Findings

Moisture readings were **high** at the port chine.

- [x] Sound the hull
- [ ] Re-core the soft patch

| Area | Reading |
| --- | --- |
| Port chine | 22% |
| Keel | 9% |

[hull-survey-2026.pdf](files/hull-survey-2026.pdf)

![port-chine.jpg](files/port-chine.jpg)

Related: [[Belle — 2025 haul-out]]

Frontmatter carries the title, the tags, both timestamps and the source URL of a web clip. The attachment links are relative and they resolve — open that file in any Markdown viewer and the photo renders, because the bytes are right there in files/. Links between your own notes come out as [[wikilinks]], so the connections you built survive the trip.

The part that actually matters

Anyone can write a Markdown exporter. The reason this one took real work is that we made it the same Markdown Harbor reads.

Harbor already imports a zipped Obsidian vault — folders become notebooks, wikilinks become real Harbor links, attachments get matched up. The Markdown we export is deliberately that exact dialect. Which means:

1. Export your account as Markdown.
2. Work in Obsidian for a year. Or Bear, or iA Writer, or vim.
3. Zip it back up and import it.

Your notebooks, tags, created and updated dates, attachments and inter-note links all land back where they belong. The door swings both ways.

That constraint shaped the archive. Notebook folders sit at the top level rather than under a tidy notebooks/ wrapper, because Harbor’s importer maps a note’s top-level folder to its notebook — a wrapper directory would re-import your whole account into a single notebook called “notebooks.” We picked the layout that round-trips over the one that looks neater in a file listing.

What Markdown doesn’t carry — said plainly

Markdown is a small format. That’s the point of it, and it costs you a few things.

Tasks come back as checklists. This is the one to know about. A Harbor task is a real record with a due date, a reminder, a repeat and a flag. Markdown has no such thing, so we write the details into the line using the Obsidian Tasks convention:

- [ ] Re-core the soft patch 🔁 every week 📅 2025-08-20 ⏰ 2025-08-19 00:00 🚩
- [x] Sound the hull 📅 2025-08-20 ✅ 2025-08-21

Nothing is hidden and nothing is dropped — it’s all right there in the text. But re-import that file and those come back as plain editor checklists, not tasks. The dates stay as words on the line. If you want a lossless task round trip, export as Evernote (ENEX), which carries every task field as a real field.

We could have quietly let that slide and called the round trip perfect. We’d rather you know which format to reach for.

Formatting flattens where Markdown has no word for it. Highlight, underline, superscript, subscript, text colour and font choices come out as plain text. Everything structural survives. If you want a copy that looks exactly like Harbor does, that’s what the HTML export is for.

Encrypted notes aren’t included. The export runs on our servers, and our servers hold ciphertext — that’s the whole design. They’re skipped and counted, same as in the other formats.

Three sizes

It isn’t only the whole-account button:

• One note — the ⋯ menu, Download Markdown. Saves straight to your machine. A .md if the note has no attachments, a .zip if it does.
• One notebook — right-click it in the sidebar, Export…, pick Markdown.
• Everything — Settings → Account, Export as Markdown. We build it in the background and email you a link.

From a terminal, it’s harbor account export --format markdown and harbor notes export <note-id>.

It works the same on the web, Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android, because the file is built in one place on the server rather than reimplemented five times. The export you get from your phone is byte-for-byte the export you get from your laptop.

Why bother

Because “you can leave” is only a real sentence if leaving lands you somewhere usable, and coming back doesn’t cost you anything either.

A notes app that can only export to its own format is offering you a photocopy of the exit sign. Plain .md files in ordinary folders will still open in forty years, on hardware nobody has designed yet, with no company involved. That’s the copy worth having — and it’s exactly the copy we’d want if we were you.

We’d rather you stay because Harbor is good. That’s the whole idea.

Full instructions, including every scope, what’s in the archive, and the encrypted-note limitation: How do I export my notes as Markdown?