> "I switched note apps and half my notes did not come over — and the ones that did look like a stranger wrote them." ^pain A personal survivability pain. When the worker's tool is replaced — by choice or because the vendor sunsets it — the notes inside do not transfer cleanly. Some files are lost, others get reformatted into something the original author would not recognise. A ten-year vault becomes a one-year vault every time the tool changes; the cost is paid in full each migration, regardless of how thoughtfully the original notes were authored. ## Discovery questions - "Have you ever tried to move all your notes from one app to another? How did that go?" - "If your current notes app shut down tomorrow, what fraction of what's in it would you successfully recover?" - "How much of your past notes are in formats only one specific app understands?" ^discovery-questions ## Examples - A Roam Research user documented broken block references and lost bidirectional links when migrating their graph into Obsidian.[^1] - A PKM blogger described losing internal links and context moving from Notion to Obsidian.[^2] - reMarkable 1 owner reported losing annotations when moving notebooks and PDFs between reMarkable and other apps during a device upgrade.[^3] [^1]: https://nesslabs.com/roam-to-obsidian [^2]: https://www.keepproductive.com/blog/notion-to-obsidian-migration [^3]: https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360033059378-data-loss-when-migrating