You do not have to leave Obsidian
Keep the vault. Bring a folder only if you want the days here.
Nobody should move a vault they spent two years shaping because a website suggested it. Obsidian is a structure you built, and it took time to get right. River is for today's writing — the page you open before you know what the words are for. Those are different jobs, and people do both. Keep both for a while and see which one you open.
getting your notes out
If you do want some of the past sitting behind today's page, zip a folder of Markdown. That is the path that still holds the images. Loose .md files come across as text only. River reads a copy; the vault is untouched.
A zip up to 500MB, or loose files up to 20MB.
what arrives
The Markdown, as ordinary notes. Date-named files become days by default — River does not ask first. River keeps one note for each day. If that date is already taken, the file arrives as an ordinary note. Images only when you drop a zip that still holds them, within your plan's image allowance.
what the export leaves out
The graph, the plugins, and anything the vault holds that is not a file you exported. Wikilinks stay as written; they do not become a working graph here.
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.