What to Do With Your Old Notes After Switching
Switched note-taking apps? Here's how to handle your old notes — what to import, what to leave, and how to start fresh without losing context.
You've decided to switch note-taking apps. Your new tool is ready. But now you're staring at hundreds (or thousands) of notes in your old app and facing the migration question that stops most people from switching at all: what do I do with everything I've already written?
The anxiety is real. Your old notes feel like they contain important things. Importing everything feels overwhelming. Starting fresh feels risky. Most people stay stuck in this limbo -- keeping the old app "just in case" while halfheartedly using the new one, never fully committing to either.
Here's the good news: you don't have to choose between importing everything and losing everything. There's a middle path that works for most people.
The 90-Day Rule
Most of your old notes are not valuable. This is hard to hear, but it's true. If you haven't looked at a note in 90 days, the odds of you needing it are low. The few notes you do need are findable -- they're in the old app, which isn't going anywhere.
Instead of importing your entire archive, start fresh. Capture new notes in your new app. Leave the old app installed as a read-only archive. For the next 30 days, if you need an old note, pull it into the new app manually. After 30 days, look at how many old notes you actually retrieved. For most people, the answer is fewer than ten.
This approach eliminates the migration paralysis without losing access to anything important.
What's Worth Importing
If you do want to import, be selective. Not all notes age well. Here's a framework:
Import: Active reference material -- contacts, ongoing project notes, current client information, procedures you use regularly, and anything you've looked at in the last month. These notes are current and useful.
Leave behind: Meeting notes older than six months (unless tied to an active relationship), completed project notes, drafts you never finished, and quick captures that served their purpose in the moment.
Review before importing: Notes with personal information, credentials, or sensitive content. Switching apps is a natural moment to audit what you're storing and whether it should transfer to a new system.
Mem supports importing from multiple sources including Notion, Evernote, and Apple Notes. The import process brings your notes into a searchable, AI-powered system where they become more useful than they were in their original home.
Starting Fresh Is a Feature, Not a Bug
There's a counterintuitive benefit to not importing everything: your new app starts clean. The signal-to-noise ratio is perfect because every note is recent and relevant.
This means AI features like Mem Chat and Heads Up work at their best from day one. You're not asking the AI to sift through thousands of stale notes to find the handful that matter. You're building a fresh knowledge base where everything contributes to useful retrieval.
Over time, this fresh start compounds. Every note you capture is a note you chose to capture with intention. The resulting collection is denser, more relevant, and more useful than any archive you'd import wholesale. For more on this philosophy, see our guide on why folders fail and what to do instead.
The Gradual Migration Approach
If starting completely fresh feels too aggressive, try a gradual migration:
Week 1: Capture all new notes in the new app. Don't import anything.
Week 2: Import only the notes you actively needed from the old app during week 1.
Week 3: Import any reference material you keep going back to -- client lists, procedures, templates.
Week 4: Evaluate. How often are you opening the old app? If rarely, you're done. If often, import the specific category of notes that keeps pulling you back.
This approach lets your usage patterns guide the migration instead of making upfront decisions about what's important.
Handling the "What If I Need It" Anxiety
The fear of losing notes is usually about possibility, not probability. You imagine a future where you desperately need a note from 2019. In practice, that future almost never arrives.
A pragmatic approach: export your old notes as a backup file. Most note-taking apps offer bulk export. Save the export to cloud storage. Now you have an insurance policy without cluttering your new system. If you ever need an old note, it's findable -- just not in your primary workspace.
This separates the archive function (keeping a record) from the working function (using notes productively). Your new app handles the working function. The backup handles the archive.
When to Go All-In on Import
Some use cases genuinely benefit from importing everything:
Client-facing professionals who reference years of relationship history and need that context available for AI retrieval
Researchers with an accumulated knowledge base that's actively queried
People with fewer than 200 notes where the import is small enough to be manageable
If you fall into one of these categories, import everything and let Mem's AI make sense of it. The import process handles the technical side, and Chat makes even old, unorganized notes immediately useful.
For detailed comparisons with the app you're coming from, see our guides on Notion vs Mem, Evernote vs Mem, Obsidian vs Mem, or Apple Notes vs Mem.
Getting Started
Install Mem alongside your current app -- don't delete anything yet
Capture all new notes in Mem for one week
Import only the notes you actively needed from the old app during that week
After 30 days, assess how often you open the old app and decide your long-term approach
The best time to switch note-taking apps is when you're ready to start a new knowledge-building habit. Your old notes got you here. Your new ones will take you further.
