Getting your notes out

Copy, export, and back up. Your notes are never locked in.

Everything you write in Pagenail can leave it, in a format something else can read. There are three routes out, for three different jobs.

Copy

The Copy button — on the note panel toolbar, on a thread note, on a sticky, in the dashboard — puts the note on your clipboard twice at once: as Markdown source and as formatted HTML.

Whatever you paste into picks the version it understands. Paste into GitHub or a text editor and you get the Markdown you wrote; paste into Notion, Confluence, or an email and you get formatting.

Copy in the note panel takes every note on the page — thread notes and stickies together, oldest first.

Export a file

Export downloads a file. It’s available for a single note (a sticky’s ⋯ menu, or the dashboard’s note modal) and for everything on a page (the note panel toolbar).

FormatExtensionGood for
Markdown.mdNotes apps, repositories, anything plain-text
HTML.htmlReading and sharing as-is — styled, self-contained, light and dark
Plain text.txtMaximum portability

Files are named pagenail-<page-title>-<timestamp> and include the page address and export date at the top.

The dashboard’s per-page export button is slightly different: instead of downloading, it opens a formatted page of all that page’s notes in a new tab, with a button to flip between newest and oldest first. Save it from there if you want the file.

Back up everything

Settings has Export backup, which downloads all of Pagenail’s local data — every note, every preference — as a single JSON file named pagenail-backup-<timestamp>.json.

This is the one that round-trips. Import backup in the same place reads the file back.

Two warnings about importing:

  • It replaces your local data rather than merging with it. Anything written since the backup is gone.
  • The dashboard needs a reload afterwards to show the restored notes.

Back up before you remove, reload, or reinstall the extension.