Bring your Standard Notes into River
An encrypted backup is refused, not half-read. Decrypt it first.
You chose Standard Notes because it does not open your notes without you, and River does not either. A decrypted Standard Notes backup arrives as ordinary notes, with titles, bodies, tags and dates. An encrypted backup cannot come across. Decrypt it in Standard Notes first, then drop that JSON in.
River cannot open an encrypted Standard Notes backup. Decrypt it in Standard Notes, then bring that JSON.
getting your notes out
In Standard Notes, open Preferences → Backups and download a decrypted backup. Drop the .json, or a zip that contains it, in as it arrives.
A JSON file up to 10MB, or a zip up to 100MB.
what arrives
Note titles and bodies, tags when the backup includes them, and created and updated dates.
what the export leaves out
Encrypted backups. Extensions, files, and anything that is not an ordinary note. 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.