Jamie Todd Rubin spent more than ten years putting paper into Evernote. By 2021 he had over 12,000 notes. When he moved to Obsidian, he curated the pile instead of importing it.
In January 2022 he wrote how he was moving notes. He started with frequent notes, then keepers, then whatever life asked for.
If you are looking at the same route, start with the Evernote → Obsidian playbook. Jamie’s post is the field report for a curated move. The playbook is the bulk ENEX path.
Why he left
Evernote still worked for him. He said he was not leaving because of problems with the service. He had been a happy user for more than ten years. Software wanderlust pulled him toward a tool he had already been using since January 2021.
He also had a mess. About 80% of the notes he had never looked at. Many arrived through services like FileThis. Another 10% he had opened maybe once. The remaining 10% or less, under 1,200 notes, were the ones he used.
From 2012 to 2016 he had tried to go completely paperless. He could do it. He did not want to keep doing it. Some things were faster in a Field Notes notebook. Journals stayed on paper. Scanning every scrap and never opening it again wasted time, and the unused notes made search worse.
Obsidian gave him things he wanted in Evernote. Notes are Markdown files in a local folder. He can link them, see backlinks, and transclude one note inside another. The operating system can search by last opened date. Evernote can search by created and modified dates, but not by last viewed.
He called the vault DFC, for Digital Filing Cabinet. Plain text plus PDFs and images. Spotlight can find a microwave manual without opening the app.
The order of operations
He had no magic export, and he did not want one. A one-shot import would have copied the unused notes too.
He used a hierarchy of needs:
- Notes he opened often in Evernote. Fifty or fewer. Birth certificates, car records, the form data he used for school paperwork.
- Notes he wanted to keep even if he rarely opened them. He already had tags for this.
scrapbookfor his kids’ art and his own early writing.contractsfor story and article contracts. - Everything else, only when something in life pointed at it.
The first two groups were a few hundred notes at most, out of more than 12,000. A few months before the post, Kelly needed their older daughter’s 4th grade report card. He found it in Evernote, copied it into Obsidian, and left the other report cards where they were.
Tax season was coming. He planned to move the tax notes then, and to clean up the format while he did it.
Later he tightened the usage numbers. In Episode 19 he said 100 to 200 notes were regular, another 100 to 200 were periodic, and about 11,500 notes, 96% of the pile, had almost never been touched.
How he moved a note
Each note was hand work.
He copied the text out of Evernote and pasted it into a new Obsidian note. If he had a template, he used it. He often rewrote the layout so the note was easier to use. If a date sat on the original, he set the Zettelkasten ID in the title to match.
PDFs and images went into an _attachments folder. He then made a document note that transcludes the file. The note holds tags and other metadata. The PDF shows up in preview.
He tagged the Obsidian note with his current taxonomy. Then he tagged the Evernote original MIGRATED.
The MIGRATED tag was the only tracker he described. Evernote stayed up, so an untagged note still had a source.
What he gained
He got the notes he used without dragging 12,000 files into a new vault.
In the first 14 months of Obsidian he had about 900 notes. Evernote had grown past 12,000 because everything went in.
By January 2023 all of his notes and writing lived in Obsidian. The vault had about 4,000 notes. He synced them with Obsidian Sync, not iCloud or Dropbox. When he stopped using Evernote, he exported the remaining data into his archive, next to the Facebook and Twitter dumps.
He also got a second pass at the keepers. The Form Data note was rewritten for the family, with sections for people, shared facts, and cars.
What he left behind
Most of the 12,000 notes stayed in Evernote for a long time on purpose. He expected that by the end of 2022 he would have moved 99.9% of what he needed. He called the rest noise.
In June 2021, before the series, he still treated Evernote as the filing cabinet. OCR search let him find a document in about 30 seconds among those 12,000 notes. He said dropping PDFs into Obsidian lost that speed. Keeping Evernote live while he curated was how he avoided that gap.
Obsidian can import an Evernote ENEX export. Evernote’s desktop export writes ENEX or HTML. Notebook stacks and tag trees need extra renaming. That path exists. Jamie skipped it because a clean vault mattered more than a complete one.
A bulk import also drops things the playbook already flags. Reminders, tasks, Evernote OCR search, sharing, and note history do not become Markdown behavior.
What I would copy
Build the frequent-notes list first. Jamie already had one index note that pointed at the documents he opened for forms. Start there.
Use the tags you already have. scrapbook and contracts told him what to keep. You do not need a new taxonomy to begin.
Tag the Evernote original MIGRATED so you can see what already moved. Leave the account up until you stop opening it. Then take a full export for the archive, the way he did in 2023.
If you do want every note, use the Evernote → Obsidian playbook. Pilot one notebook. Check attachments, internal links, and tags before you scale. Jamie’s write-up is for the other case, when most of the archive is unused.