River beside iA Writer
Keep the long work where it is.
Do not move a manuscript out of the app it is being written in. iA Writer is for the long work. River is for today's writing — the page you open before you know what the words are for. Those are different jobs. Keep both, and see which one you open. If you do want a folder sitting behind today's page, you can bring a Markdown or TextBundle export without touching the library itself.
getting your notes out
Export Markdown or TextBundle files from iA Writer. Zip the folder if the app does not make an archive for you. Drop the zip or .textpack in.
Up to 100MB in one go.
what arrives
The Markdown, titles, and tags written in the files. Images in a TextBundle, within your plan's image allowance. If the files look like one note a day, River offers to file them into days.
what the export leaves out
Library organisation, smart folders, and live transclusion. The original library is untouched.
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.