Import, export and backups

Your notes are yours to keep and take anywhere. This page covers making a backup and restoring it, moving to a new Mac, getting deleted notes back, bringing notes in from other apps, and exporting them in the format you need.

Back up your library

Choose File › Back Up Library… and pick a place to save, such as an external drive. Varlig saves a folder with a name like Varlig-2026-09-16.varligbackup, holding:

every note, including the ones in Trash and Archive
a copy of every picture and file attached to them.

Password-protected notes stay encrypted inside the backup. Other notes are stored as readable text, so keep backups somewhere private. Settings, such as your theme and calculation preferences, aren’t part of a backup, and Varlig doesn’t make backups on its own.

Restore a backup

Choose File › Restore Backup… and select a .varligbackup folder. Restoring adds to your library rather than replacing it:

Notes that are already in your library, unchanged, are skipped.
If a note has changed since the backup, the backup’s version comes back as a separate note, so nothing is overwritten.
Your other notes stay as they are.

Varlig tells you how many notes it restored when it’s done.

Move to a new Mac

On your old Mac, choose File › Back Up Library….
Copy the .varligbackup folder to the new Mac, for example with an external drive or AirDrop.
On the new Mac, open Varlig and choose File › Restore Backup….

Your notes, tags and attachments come across. Choose your theme, fonts and calculation settings again on the new Mac, since settings aren’t part of a backup.

Trash and Archive

Note › Delete Note moves a note to the Trash, where you can still open it. Note › Restore Note (⇧⌘R) brings it back.

File › Empty Trash… (⇧⌘⌫) deletes everything in the Trash for good, after asking you to confirm. This can’t be undone, but copies in backups you made earlier aren’t affected.

Varlig doesn’t keep a version history you can browse, so a regular backup is the way to go back to an earlier state of your notes.

Bring notes in

File › Import Notes… (⇧⌘O) copies notes into Varlig from:

Markdown and plain text files, or whole folders of them
TextBundle and TextPack
HTML, rich text (RTF and RTFD) and Word documents
Evernote (ENEX), Drafts and Day One exports
Soulver sheets and sheetbooks

Choose Keep original dates, Use filenames as titles or Escape tags already in note text before importing.

Coming from Bear or Soulver on the same Mac? Settings › Imports has Import from Bear and Import from Soulver, which find your existing library automatically. Imports always make copies and leave the originals untouched.

Bear notes you’ve encrypted in Bear need to be exported unlocked from Bear first.
Let Bear download all attachments before you import.
Each Soulver sheet becomes a calculation note, with its original file attached.

To save a web page as a note, choose File › Clip Web Page… and enter its address. Pages that need a sign-in or JavaScript may not give Varlig their text.

Take notes out

File › Export Notes… (⇧⌘S) saves the selected notes as Markdown, plain text, TextBundle, HTML, rich text, Word, PDF, JPEG or EPUB. Formatted exports such as PDF include your calculation answers; Markdown keeps the calculations as you wrote them.

Select several notes in the list to export them together, or right-click a tag and choose Export Tag….
In a note’s … menu, Copy As copies the note as plain text, Markdown, HTML or rich text.
File › Print Note… (⌘P) prints the current note.

Exported copies aren’t encrypted, even when the note has a password, and a very long note is best exported as PDF rather than JPEG.

Because every note is Markdown, your writing is never locked into Varlig.