This document tells how to migrate your notes from Recall-It to another app. You have multiple options: the appropriate one depends on how much data you have to migrate, your level of engagement, and whether you want to purchase another app. No matter which option you choose, you must export some or all of your notes first.


How to Export Your Notes from Recall-It

If you have been backing up your Recall-It notes, either manually or automatically, via the Settings (gear icon), please note that these backups are NOT the same as exported notes and should not be used in the migration options described below.

To export your notes, tap on the "..." icon on the lower right side of the notes list, tap "Select All" (or manually select some subset of your notes if for some reason you don't want to migrate everything), tap "More...", tap "Export...", make a note of the name of the folder where the notes will be saved to, then tap OK.

When the export has finished, open the Files app on iOS (Finder on the Mac), go to "iCloud Drive", tap on the "Recall-It" folder, tap on the folder name you noted above and you should see multiple text (.txt) files, one for each note you exported. These are the files you should use when importing into another app.

NOTE: the exported note files you just created are standard text files. If you have been including images and/or PDFs in your notes, these exported notes will have human readable links to the appropriate media (i.e. the file names), but not the actual images or PDFs. To find all of your actual image and PDF files, go to "iCloud Drive -> Recall-It -> Attachments". Before you proceed, it would be a good idea to back up both the "Attachments" and the exported notes folders so you can easily recover if anything goes wrong. (If you are working on Mac and have installed the importer software we provide (discussed below), it will have already created empty Exported and Attachments folders -- these would be excellent places to back up your notes and attachments.)


Migration options

Because your exported notes are plain text, you should be able to import them into any app that supports plain text which includes most, if not all, notes apps. Consult the documentation for any app you are considering for details.

Here we will discuss in detail two specific migration options, one of which might be appropriate for you depending on whether you are a "casual" or "power" user of notes. If you are a casual user and do not have lots (thousands) of notes, the Apple Notes app could be a good choice. On the other hand, if you have many notes and/or want a powerful and full featured information manager, DEVONthink is our choice and recommendation. 

Regardless of which migration path you choose, make sure your exported notes have fully downloaded from iCloud on the device where you are planning to import. This might take a significant amount of time if you have lots of notes.


Migrating to Apple notes

Migrating to Apple Notes is easiest on a Mac. Simply open the Notes app, go to File -> Import to Notes... and navigate to the folder containing your exported notes (.txt files). Afte the import, look in the folder "Imported Notes" for your notes. The import step is non-destructive so if something is not right you can always delete the imported notes and try again.

If you do not have the option of using a Mac for the import, you can still import on an iOS device. We were able to drag-and-drop from the Files app to the Notes app on iPad, but unfortunately this only seems to work for one file at a time, so not great if you are importing more than a few files. What worked better is a simple Shortcut than iterates through the export folder and creates and imports a new note for each file. You can find the Shortcut we created to do this here: http://www.microspell.com/recall-it/faqs.html On installation, it will prompt you to navigate to the folder where you stored your exported notes. You can also change the import folder which defaults to Imported Notes. To run the shortcut, tap the "play" (run) button if you are viewing it in the shortcut editor; otherwise, find it in your list of shortcuts and tap it.

If your notes have image or PDF attachments, the Apple Notes app will not recognize them. Instead, you will see a link similar to this: xatchPDF:///Attachments/pdf-2019-10-02-16-45-25-1.pdf at the point where the attachment was included. The link includes the file name of the attachment so you could manually drag-and-drop the file next to (or in place of) the link to import it into your note. This might be reasonable if you don't have too many attachments, or only care about importing a manageable subset. Otherwise, consider DEVONthink where we provide AppleScript and Swift scripts to automatically link your attachments into Markdown format notes.


Migrating to DEVONthink 

We suggest you at least skim the following before starting your DEVONthink migration. It might look like this is complicated, but that's because there are many options. To perform the default import that we used, the tl;dr is this: (1) set up DEVONthink as described under "Configuring DEVONthink for Import" below; (2) Open the recall-it-import script in Script Editor and press the "play" (run) button.

DEVONthink is our preferred migration destination since nothing else we've tried has such a rich and powerful feature set. It is not perfect though; here are a few reasons that might give you pause. It is not cheap: at least $100 on Mac, less on iOS. There is a bit of a learning curve. You will need a Mac to use our import script which makes use of the extensive AppleScript dictionary that DEVONthink provides. Finally, we have found their iCloud sync implementation to be less than reliable and have fallen back to use their Bonjour sync which has worked flawlessly so far. You might be ok with this if you don't require real-time, in the field, syncing on your iOS devices.

If you want to try DEVONthink, download and install the trial version on your Mac, and also the import scripts from our web site: http://www.microspell.com/recall-it/faqs.html  When you run our installer, it will create a folder named dtImport in your Documents folder where it places the scripts and two empty folders, Attachments and Exported. To use the scripts, you'll first have to copy your exported notes (see above) to the Exported folder. Although the scripts do not use them directly, we also suggest you copy your attachments to the Attachments folder for backup, and wait until everything has finished downloading from iCloud before proceeding. (If you are unfamiliar with DEVONthink, you might want to take some time now to set up a test database and learn the basic features and operations.)

Our import script makes some assumptions about the DEVONthink database and groups you'll be importing into. While you could modify the script to change these assumptions (see the relevant set statements at the top of the recall-it-import script), it is probably easier to go with the defaults and rename/move things later inside of DEVONthink if necessary.
Finally, don't hesitate to experiment: importing is non-destructive so you can always delete the imported items from DEVONthink and reimport.

Configuring DEVONthink for Import

The import script makes the following assumptions: you'll be importing into a database named Recall-It-Import. The notes will be saved in a group named Imported and their attachments will be located in a group named Attachments. Before running the script, you should manually create the database and the two aforementioned groups. Also, add your attachments to the Attachments group by dragging and dropping the files. As the script imports your notes, it will automatically edit them to make sure the attachment links point to the appropriate files in the Attachments group. The script will import all of your notes in Markdown format. The main reason for this is to show your attachments as both links and previews as in Recall-It notes. Also, if you have been using the Recall-It convention that headings are short lines of text preceded by two or more blank lines and followed by one blank line, the import script will convert these to Markdown headings, by default. Finally, your imported notes will be renamed (within DEVONthink only) based on the first line(s) of text to be more meaningful when they appear in search results.

If for some reason you do not want to have your notes converted to Markdown, or if you want finer control to omit some of the conversions the script does by default, you can make some changes in the recall-it-import script. To disable Markdown conversion, look for the line "create record with" and change type:markdown to type:txt. If you do this, also look for the "set markdownOptions" line and change "HSAXL" to "X" to disable all markdown-specific conversions, but keep checkbox replacements (below). (Or set it to the null string "" to disable all changes.)

If you are ok with converting your notes to Markdown format, but want to disable some of the default changes, you can edit the markdownOptions string which is "HSAXL" by default. Each letter that is present enables its corresponding conversion; delete any letter to turn off its associated conversion. The meanings of the letters are as follows:

H - prefix potential headings with # and subheadings with ## for improved Markdown rendering
S - append two spaces to short lines (up to 100 characters long) so they are not concatenated when rendered
A - replace Recall-It style attachment links with a form that renders in Markdown as a link next to an image
X - replace unchecked checkboxes with [ ] and checked checkboxes with [x]
L - request that web links be translated to markdown format

The source code for the script that performs the above conversions is included (markupHeading.swift); you are welcome to make further customizations if the above option are not adequate, but you'll need to have the Swift compiler installed to recompile (using the included shell script compileAndMerge).

There are no options to control the metadata that is applied to your imported notes. All imported notes will carry the same creation date, last updated date, and tags they had when exported from Recall-It. However, you can disable any of these by editing the recall-it-import script and deleting the appropriately named parameters from the "create record with" line.

When you are ready to import, open the recall-it-import script in Script Editor and make sure DEVONthink is running and the Recall-It-Import database is open. In Script Editor, press the "play" (run) button. If you show Accessory View and click "Messages", you can follow the progress of the import, and determine which note is problematic if the import should fail since notes are imported in file name numerical sequence. 

The script makes a temporary copy of each of your notes and modifies that as described above before importing it. This means you can easily recover from problems or change your mind about import options by simply deleting any imported notes from DEVONthink and redoing the import.