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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.

A backup holds every note with its own settings, every attachment, your tag icons and pins, and your reminders. It doesn’t hold app preferences — your theme, fonts or the backup schedule — or your saved searches, reading lists, review state and scratchpad.

Varlig also backs the library up on its own, daily, keeping the last seven copies beside your library. See Version history and automatic backups.

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

With iCloud sync on, sign in to the new Mac with the same Apple Account, open Varlig and turn on Sync notes with iCloud in Settings › Sync & Backup. Your notes, tags, attachments, saved searches and reading lists arrive through iCloud. To move without sync, or bring device-local items such as reminders, use a backup:

  1. On your old Mac, choose File › Back Up Library….
  2. Copy the .varligbackup folder to the new Mac, for example with an external drive or AirDrop.
  3. 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 also keeps up to 30 earlier versions of each note, so you can go back without restoring a whole backup: see Version history and automatic backups. Emptying the Trash deletes those notes’ versions with them.

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 › Import & Export 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, plain text without answers, Markdown, HTML or rich text.
  • File › Print Note… (⌘P) prints the current note.

The export sheet also chooses the theme, text size and paper, whether to include tags and comments, and whether to embed pictures. When you export several notes at once, Link exported notes together rewrites the links between them so they still work in the exported folder, and the report afterwards says how many links were rewritten and which attachments were missing.

Exporting several notes also writes manifest.json at the top of the folder, for you or a script to read: each note’s file, the attachment files copied for it and any that were missing, the locale its calculations were read in and their date order, and how many links were rewritten. Locked and protected notes that were skipped are counted, never named. A folder that already has a manifest.json keeps it, and the new one is manifest-2.json.

Answers in exported files

Plain text keeps each answer after its calculation, so an exported note reads the way it looks:

hotel = €160 × 3   = €480.00

For Markdown and TextBundle, Include calculation answers adds them after the block as an HTML comment, which other apps don’t display and Varlig doesn’t recalculate:

<!-- varlig:answers (frozen results of the calc block above)
line 1: hotel = €160 × 3 → €480.00
locale: en_US
date order: month/day
-->

The last two lines say which locale the answers were written in and how it reads a date such as 05/06/2026, so anyone reading the file knows whether that was May or June.

Calculation values (CSV) exports every answer from the selected notes into one spreadsheet, with its note, block, line, value and unit. The values are frozen results, not formulas.

Page breaks

A line containing only <!-- pagebreak --> starts a new page, and Format › Insert Page Break writes one for you. Page breaks apply to PDF, printing, Word, rich text (RTF), HTML and EPUB; in Word and RTF they’re the same page breaks those formats use themselves. A break at the very start or end, or two in a row, never makes a blank page.

Share a note

The … menu’s Share submenu sends a note to any app in the macOS Share menu — Messages, Mail, AirDrop — as Plain Text with Answers, Rich Text, PDF or Image (Phone Width). Varlig shows the exact payload first, with a Copy and a Save As… button beside the share sheet.

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. Locked notes are skipped and listed in the export report; unlocked protected notes are included only if you tick Include unlocked protected notes.

Publish a read-only snapshot

To give someone a set of notes to read rather than a file to open, File › Publish Snapshot… writes them as a folder of static pages that reads in any browser, offline and on a phone. See Publishing a snapshot.

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