How do I export my notes as Markdown?

Markdown is the plainest thing your notes can become: one .md file per note, readable in any text editor written in the last forty years. Harbor exports it at three scales — a single note, one notebook, or everything — and imports it back.

Your whole account

On the web, Mac and Windows it’s under Settings → Account, or on the Import & export screen. On iPhone and Android, open More and tap your name at the top; on iPad, open Home in the sidebar and tap your avatar.

Press Export as Markdown. We build the ZIP on our servers and email you a link when it’s done, so you can close Harbor and walk away.

One notebook

Right-click a notebook in the sidebar — or use the menu on its header, or on its row in Manage → Notebooks — and choose Export…. The same three formats appear.

A notebook export is an ordinary export job — same progress, same email, same link. It uses the same Markdown slot as a whole-account one, so you hold one Markdown export at a time either way.

One note

Open the note, click the ⋯ menu, and choose Download Markdown. This one saves straight to your computer — no email, no waiting.

You get a .md file if the note has no attachments, and a .zip holding the .md plus a files folder if it does.

What’s in the ZIP

A folder per notebook, a .md per note, and every attachment 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 an Obsidian vault as it stands. Point Obsidian at the unzipped folder and it opens — no conversion step, no importer.

Each note carries its details in YAML frontmatter at the top:

---
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

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

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

tags and source only appear when the note has them. Links between your notes come out as [[Wikilinks]], which is what Obsidian expects — and a link to a note that isn’t in the export becomes a full Harbor URL rather than a broken one.

It comes back

This is the part worth knowing: the Markdown Harbor writes is the same Markdown Harbor imports from an Obsidian vault. Export it, edit it in Obsidian for a year, zip it up, import it — your notebooks, tags, dates and attachments all land back where they belong.

Very few notes apps will let you leave and come back. That’s deliberate.

Tasks come back as checklists — read this bit

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 those details into the line itself using the Obsidian Tasks convention — the one the rest of the Markdown world already reads:

- [ ] 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. But if you import that Markdown back into Harbor, those come back as plain editor checklists, not tasks — the dates and repeats stay as text on the line, and Harbor won’t put them back in your task list. If a lossless task round trip is what you’re after, export as Evernote (ENEX) instead; ENEX carries every task field as a real field.

Tasks attached to a note but not placed in its body aren’t lost either — they’re appended under a ## Tasks heading at the end of the file.

What Markdown can’t carry

Markdown is a small format, on purpose. These come out as plain text:

Highlight and underline
Superscript and subscript
Text colour and font choices

Everything structural survives — headings, bold, italic, lists, checkboxes, tables, code blocks, quotes, links and images. If you want a copy that looks exactly like Harbor does, export as HTML instead; that’s the pixel-faithful one.

Encrypted notes aren’t included

Encrypted notes are built so we can’t read them, and the Markdown export runs on our servers — so it has ciphertext and nothing else. They’re skipped, and counted, and Download Markdown doesn’t appear in the menu of an encrypted note.

If you need a readable copy of those, unlock them in the Mac or Windows app and use the local Export as HTML on its Import & Export screen — that one runs on your own computer, where the key is. It doesn’t include attachments. It’s the same trade-off that keeps encrypted notes out of search.

The mechanics

It builds in the background. Close the app, shut the laptop — we email you a link when it’s ready, and email you if it fails.
The link lasts three days, then we delete that copy from our storage. Start another whenever you like.
One Markdown export at a time, and it’s independent of your HTML and Evernote ones — all three can exist at once.
From the terminal: harbor account export --format markdown --wait --download ./harbor.zip, or harbor notes export <note-id> -o note.md for a single note. See the CLI.

For the whole picture on exports — every format, and what each one is best at — see Can I export everything?