Migrating to G Suite: Keep

Dec. 2020 Update:
After completing this migration to Google Keep and working with it for the year, I’ve decided to bail on it because a) the way it presents your note collection is very clunky and limiting and b) the lack of basic formatting options was killing me.

Check out Migrating from Google Keep to Evernote to learn how I moved off of Google Keep (relatively) painlessly!

Google Keep – Google’s answer to Evernote – is a great way to organize notes, links and other miscellaneous bits of info.

Unfortunately, Google Takeout doesn’t do a good job of exporting this info – it basically saves each note as an HTML file with no way to import them in to a new account.

So, similar to how I migrated my custom maps, the play here is to do the following:

1. From the original account, open each note and add the new G Suite account as a “collaborator”
2. In the new (G Suite) account, select each newly-shared note and “Make a copy” of them
   
3. With the shared notes still selected, now “Delete notes”
4. Finally, select your copies and “Change labels” to label them

Here are a few pointers to minimize the pain of doing this:

1. Start by organizing your original collection of notes with labels – preferably a single label per-note. Why? because I found this process to be a bit easier to go through if I did the share/copy/delete routine label-by label. Once I got one group of notes over to the new account then I could, en masse, assign them the same label as they had in the old account (as described by Step #4 above)
2. Make sure every note has a label so that you don’t miss any as you go through this process
3. Leave your original collection intact until you can verify that you got all of them successfully copied over to your G Suite account