Moving your notes · Updated October 6, 2026
Get your notes out of Bear
Bear is already Markdown underneath and exports the whole library in one go. The only work is deciding what to do with its tags.
| Official export | File › Export notes, the whole library at once, as Markdown, TextBundle or plain text, free. Pro adds HTML, Word, PDF and ePub. |
|---|---|
| Pictures and files | Tick Export attachments: each note’s files go in a folder named after the note, beside it. |
| Dates | Not in the Markdown export. Bear’s backup carries them, and Jimmy reads the backup. |
| Best free tool | Bear itself. Jimmy, if you want the dates. |
| Time | Minutes. |
Why people leave
Bear is one of the best-made notes apps there is, and people leave it for where it isn’t. It runs on Apple devices only; there is no Windows or Android app, and the web version has been a public beta since July 2025 that will need the Pro subscription. Sync is Pro-only and goes through iCloud alone, and when iCloud has a bad week Bear’s forum fills with notes that stopped arriving. And its tags live inside the text of the note as #tags, which is elegant in Bear and so many stray words anywhere else. None of this is Bear’s fault, exactly. It is the price of living in one ecosystem, and Bear, to its credit, has always made leaving easy.
What the export gives you
Bear is Markdown underneath, so the export is nearly the files as they are. On a Mac, click Notes in the sidebar, press ⌘A to select every note, and choose File › Export notes… (⇧⌘S). Pick Markdown, tick Export attachments, and choose a folder. Each note becomes a Markdown file named after its title, and a note with pictures or files gets a folder of the same name beside it holding them, linked from the note. On an iPhone or iPad, swipe right in the note list with two fingers to start selecting, pick the notes, and tap Export… from the menu at the bottom. Before you export, decide about tags in Settings › General › Keep tags during export: on, and every #tag stays in the text; off, and they are stripped.
The export has no dates. For those, make a backup as well (File › Backup notes…): the .bear2bk file is a zip (rename it to .zip to look inside) holding one TextBundle per note, each with the note’s text, its attachments, and a small info.json with its creation and modification dates. Encrypted notes stay encrypted in both the export and the backup.
The easiest way
- Decide about tags. If you are moving to an app that reads tags from front matter (Skysa Notes does) rather than from the text, you may prefer them stripped; a tag in the body is just a word with a hash on it.
- Notes in the sidebar, ⌘A, File › Export notes…, Markdown, Export attachments on, into an empty folder.
- Open a note that had a picture. The picture should be in the folder beside it and show when the note is opened in any Markdown app.
- Make a backup too, and keep it. It is the lossless copy, dates included.
With a terminal, for the dates
Jimmy, a free converter delivered as one program for Mac, Windows or Linux, reads the .bear2bk backup directly and writes Markdown with the attachments, the tags, and, with --frontmatter joplin, each note’s created and updated dates in the front matter, which Skysa Notes reads. Its Bear page lists what carries over.
jimmy cli "Bear Notes 2026-10-06.bear2bk" --format bear --frontmatter joplin(The download is named for your system, such as jimmy-darwin-arm64; the command calls it jimmy.) It writes a folder named for the moment it ran.
What to check afterwards
Bear’s flavour of Markdown has a few marks of its own. Search the exported folder for each:
- Tags in the text:
#tag,#parent/child, and#two words#for a tag with a space. Plain text elsewhere. - Links between notes:
[[Note Title]]. Most apps show them as text in brackets; Skysa Notes does. - Highlight as
==text==and underline as~text~. Neither is standard; both are harmless as text. - Encrypted notes came out encrypted. Unlock and export them separately, or let them go.
Then bring them into Skysa Notes
Once you have a folder of Markdown files, the rest takes a minute, and it works the same whether you use the free app on one device or have storage connected.
- Open Skysa Notes. In the storage panel, open the menu (the gear, or the ⋯ beside a source) and choose Import a folder, then pick the folder the converter made. Import files takes a zip or loose .md files instead.
- The app shows what it will add and asks first. Nothing already there is changed or replaced; a name that is taken gets a number.
- The folder’s subfolders become notebooks, as deep as they nest. Every .md file becomes a note. Every other file, pictures and PDFs included, is kept beside the notes at its own path, so a note’s
still shows the picture.
Titles and dates. A note’s title is the title in its front matter, else its first heading, else its filename. Its dates are the front matter’s created and updated (modified, date created, date modified and lastmod are read too), which is why the guides favour converters that write them: a note without them is dated the day you import it. A tags list in the front matter is searchable. Front matter and the rest of the file are kept byte for byte until you next edit the note.
What renders. CommonMark and GitHub-flavoured Markdown: headings, lists, tables, task lists, strikethrough, footnotes, code, and HTML left as written. Not rendered: [[wikilinks]], math and Mermaid diagrams, and a note with reference-style links opens as raw Markdown. Callouts show as plain quotes. Files larger than 25 MB, and hidden files and folders (names starting with a dot), are left out.
On Dropbox there is a second way in: copy the folder into Apps/skysa-notes with the Dropbox desktop app, and the notes sync in. On Google Drive the app can see only the files it made itself, so use Import there.