How to successfully move notes from Bear to Obsidian

4 min readMay 20, 2022

Recently I moved all my notes from Bear to Obsidian. During this process I found some helpful tips that will make the process faster and easier. So I decided to write a step-by-step instruction that you could follow 🙂

This instruction divided in 3 parts:

Before exporting notes from Bear
Before importing notes to Obsidian
After importing notes to Obsidian

Before exporting notes from Bear

Rename tags with spaces
Rename notes with forbidden characters (/, [], …)
Move encrypted notes to another application

1. Rename tags with spaces

Obsidian doesn’t support tags with spaces. The # in the end will be just ignored and display as regular text. You may change spaces to hyphen “-” or underscore “_”.

2. Rename notes with forbidden characters

The filename in Obsidian have forbidden characters. When you export notes from Bear, filename will be the same as notes title. You could import these notes in Obsidian, and they will work, but the links to them won’t, and you won’t be able to find them using search.

By the way, the list below is not complete. “/” and “\” are also forbidden. There might be even more, so make sure that your notes have “normal” titles 🙃

3. Move encrypted notes to another application

Unfortunately, Obsidian doesn’t allow you to encrypt (password lock) individual notes. So I advise you to move your locked notes to another app, for example, Apple Notes.

Before importing notes to Obsidian

Export notes as .md files, also don’t forget to check the Export attachments option.

Don’t forget about Archive notes in Bear

When you export notes from Bear it doesn’t export archived notes. So if you need them in Obsidian you should go to the Archive folder and export notes from there.

Now when all your notes are in a local folder, you can open them as Obsidian Vault.

Don’t group attachments folders YET

If you read this post on Obsidian Forum, they suggest to use some script to fix links, but now there is no need for this, because Obsidian could do this automatically (described in the next step).

After importing notes to Obsidian

Move attachments folders to separate folder
Fix broken links (Bear links and links to non-existent files)
Fix broken images

1. Move attachments folders to separate folder

Create “attachments” (or any other name) folder. Set this folder as default for new attachments in settings. Move all Bears folders with attachments to this new folder. To make this simpler, you could do this in native file explorer (Finder).

Path to this setting in Obsidian:
Settings -> Files & Links -> Default location for new attachments

Important! This step should be done after opening folder as an Obsidian Vault, another way these links won’t update.

2. Fix broken links

In some places you might have Bear specific links (for example, when there is a link to a header). Because they won’t work in Obsidian, you need to fix them. Simply do a search for “bear://” and manually edit link by link.

When you finished with Bear links you could start to fix links to non-existent files. For this purpose there is a great plugin Find-unlinked-files. Better do search for it in Obsidian -> Settings -> Community plugins.