Bring your Bear notes into River
Locked notes stay locked. Open them in Bear first, or they stay behind.
A backup file feels all-or-nothing. It nearly is: the one exception is a note you locked. Export a Bear backup and drop the .bear2bk in. Each note arrives as an ordinary note, with Bear's tags intact.
getting your notes out
In Bear, choose File → Backup Notes and save the .bear2bk file. Drop it in as it arrives.
Up to 100MB in one go.
what arrives
The note text, Bear hashtags as tags, and images inside each note's bundle, within your plan's image allowance.
what the export leaves out
Encrypted Bear notes. Decrypt them in Bear, then bring the backup again. Bear-only markup beyond ordinary Markdown may not survive. This is a copy, taken once.
nothing goes missing quietly
Anything that cannot come across as a file is handed back to you. When the import finishes you get a leftovers file — a zip holding the actual files, with a short note against each one saying why it stayed behind.
Empty notes, and notes River already holds — say the same item is coming through again — are counted rather than packed. A matching title is not the same note. Extra writing for a day you already have arrives as an ordinary note, not as leftovers.
Download the leftovers file before you carry on. It's held for fifteen minutes after the import, and then it's gone. It lives in the page for that window — a refresh lets it go early — and it is never written into your browser's storage.
Pictures stay in the note on every plan, up to its image allowance. Free has 100MB of retained encrypted image storage; pictures beyond that come back in the same leftovers file, with the writing still in River. Paid has no ceiling on the total. Voice recordings come across on every plan. Audio in a format River does not support, or recordings larger than it can keep, come back in the leftovers file.
The same fifteen minutes is your window to undo. One tap, then a confirm, and the whole import goes to deleted. After that, the notes are yours, and can be deleted one at a time or in multiples like anything else.
start here
Write today, even if nothing has come across yet. The archive can come when you're ready.
Your own place to write, with your writing saved to your account.