I like the idea of something like Notion but I have no idea how I would preserve my data or ever migrate it. I imagine you have to have some pretty complex stuff going on to have rich text, images, databases, macros and whatever else all in a file or notebook. Getting it out in some sort of format may not be too hard, but how would you ever migrate that to new software?
Am I over thinking this?
I know Obsidian stores everything in plaintext, but how would something like Notion or Affine (a self-hosted one) compare.


There’s always a way. I’ve gone from Evernote to Joplin to Notion. When the time comes, I’m confident I’ll be able to extract my notes.
If you don’t mind me asking, why did you migrate from Joplin to Notion?
I did the opposite (so I could self-host) but I really miss Notion. Plugins in Joplin are helpful but I really miss all of the table functions in Notion, Joplin doesn’t come close and if it does, it’s difficult to setup + use.
This being said: it was pretty annoying to move all of my stuff from Joplin to Notion. Took a good bit of work to get things close to what I wanted them to be :(
Same here, except I never got very deep in Notion, and tried Amplenote as well before settling on Obsidian.