My note-taking journey started with Evernote in the early 2000s. Back then, there were no smartphones, so Evernote was only available as a desktop app. I soon switched to OneNote, which was superior in most ways. I stuck with the desktop version of OneNote for 20 years, although I tried a lot of different note-taking apps on mobile devices.
A couple of years back I settled on Obsidian as my main note-taking app, but it didn’t take long to tire of it. While I loved the clean text, the solid markdown editor, and the expansive plug-in ecosystem, search was a mess, and using an AI plug-in like Gemini Scribe only partially solved the problem.
In the end, I couldn’t reliably find my notes in Obsidian, and I got tired of using plug-ins as a band-aid for a fundamentally broken application. After hearing about a project at work to migrate notes from OneNote to Google Drive, I did some testing and found that Google Docs works well as a repository for my notes. And even better, it’s simple to reliably search those docs using Gemini.
Also, Google Docs is fully integrated with Gemini, allowing me to leverage the technology as a writing assistant, something Obsidian doesn’t natively support. All of the solutions it offers are via plug-ins, which require creating API keys in platforms like Google AI Studio.
The big hurdle was determining how to migrate my existing Obsidian vault to Google Drive. For this task I used Cursor to write a Python script that leverages Google Cloud and the Google Docs API to seamlessly take the notes, convert the markdown and images, and create folders, docs, and tabs to correspond to every note.
After some trial and error, I migrated all my notes into Google Drive, and I’m happy with the outcome. Using Google Docs on my phone isn’t quite as convenient as a phone app, but it works. And Google Docs works well on the desktop.
If you’re interested in migrating your Obsidian vault to Google Drive and Docs, I open-sourced two scripts:
Obsidian-Vault-2-GoogleDocs-Migration
Obsidian-Folder-2-Google-Document-Migration
The first script migrates an entire Obsidian vault to Google Drive. The second migrates only the .md files in a single folder to a folder in Google Drive.
I created the second script because I want to continue creating notes in a single folder in Obsidian, and then migrate those notes to Google Drive. The script only moves notes that don’t already exist in Google Drive, and it creates a new doc for each new note.
This differs from the first script. Its main focus is to take each folder of .md files from the vault and create a corresponding doc in Google Drive, with each appearing as its own tab. Folders in the vault that don’t contain files are still recreated in Google Drive if they contain subfolders with notes.
If you have questions about my journey, or about using either script, feel free to reach out.
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