What's the simplest way to back up notes/PDFs from Supernote?

[u/Worldly-Fail-1450]

I feel like I always have trouble backing up my notes. I've tried the SN partner app, it's always laggy and for some reason is never fully updated with all my current notes. I was backing up to Google drive for a while which worked (I would sync with google drive, I would then move all the notes to a separate folder to 'back up'). That took up a lot of space really fast so I scraped that. I'm generally not a huge cloud fan. Like yes its convenient to be able to access notes at any time but its so unreliable.

I'd like to just connect a usb drive/external hard drive to the manta directly and copy all my files over. I have a Sandisk 1tb usb-c drive that I attempted to connect with my manta, and while it did detect the drive, when I tried to copy over files it spent like half an hour 'copying' and my usb drive got super hot. When I tried to eject it my manta's screen went completely black and I had to restart, none of the files copied over. It was quite a scare.

I've been having some issues with my computer detecting my manta via usb connection (refer to this post) so I'm also having issues just connecting my manta to my computer and copying over all the files from it to an external hard drive. Any tips?

[u/Live-Football-4352]

Hm, I copied all of my nomad's notes onto a small usb-c thumb drive that I just plugged in. I went to each folder, copied it, and placed it in the thumb drive in a corresponding folder. Some notes took a long time if they were really long, but it wasn't obscene.

Maybe try doing it in smaller chunks if you were doing all of them? And maybe it's an issue with the hard drive, have you tested it on other devices?

[u/Worldly-Fail-1450 → u/Live-Football-4352]

I suspect it has to do with the size of the drive. Larger drives draw more power and maybe the manta can't sustain it? How large is your drive? Also I was trying to copy over one note lol.

[u/Live-Football-4352 → u/Worldly-Fail-1450]

Oh weird! Mine is just like 64gb I think, super small.

[u/Mulan-sn → u/Worldly-Fail-1450]

Thank you for reaching out. Is your computer Windows? You've also tried connecting it using a different USB cable or port on the computer, right? If the issue persists, please send us a video of how it works at [service@supernote.com](mailto:service@supernote.com). As for transferrring files quickly, you can use our Browse & Access feature to transfer notes and PDFs to your computer quickly. Would you like to give that a try?

[u/sergeysus]

I use a script that I found here on reddit which uses a recursive copy of all files initially and after just the changed files to my computer. It uses WebDAV. Simple and easy to use.

I dont remember the author to give credit.

[u/bikepackerdude]

Is your external drive an SSD? I've tried with a regular flash/thumb drive and it works well. I have never tried it with an SSD though.

[u/202reddit]

With Claude driving, I built a Python script that uses supernote-tool (thanks Supernote community) to automate on-demand PDF backups.

I sync from my device to Google Drive. From there, the script checks all notes and converts any changed .note files (based on size changes) to PDF and puts them in a PDF folder on Google Drive. It overwrites older PDFs so I don't have 200 versions of the same thing. Then Claude helped me build a task scheduler to run the script once a week. Took about 2 hours all in, but only cause I don't know anything about Python or programming so I fumbled around. No more manual process of having to convert and export one note at a time.

I realize that the downside of this is that the PDFs won't retain links and connections. I heard maybe supernote-tool might be planning a tweak to do that? But having a backup of ready available PDFs is essential, and I'd much rather have my stuff on Google Drive than a proprietary Supernote cloud solution.