Daily backup in .MD?

[ricolandia]

Hey, again.

I'd like to suggest a built-in daily Markdown backup feature for Trilium.

The idea: automatically export all notes as .md files (preserving the folder hierarchy) on a daily schedule. This would serve 3 purposes:

1. Data portability: notes stay readable outside Trilium without needing the app or the database.
2. Safety net : a plain-text backup is immune to database corruption, migration issues, or accidental deletions.
3. Attract new users: logseq and obsidian users like this kind of solution.

Many self-hosters already back up the document.db, but a raw SQLite file isn't very useful in an emergency. Having a /backups folder full of readable Markdown files would be a much more accessible recovery option.

I actually put together a small Python script that does exactly this: it reads document.db directly (read-only, safe to run alongside a live instance), reconstructs the note hierarchy as folders, converts HTML notes to Markdown, and adds YAML frontmatter to each file. It also supports retention (e.g. keep last 7 daily backups) and optional ZIP compression.

I'm currently testing it on my self-hosted setup, but so far it's looking promising. Happy to share the code if there's interest, and would love to see something like this land as a native feature in Trilium.

Would love to hear if this is something the team has considered!

[AlexShyXie]

Great idea! On a related note: is there any existing solution or plan to automatically and incrementally import an Obsidian vault into Trilium?

[ricolandia]

Hi @AlexShyXie, I don't believe that's possible directly. However, there is a way to convert and import the vault content as a one-time process:
https://github.com/Nriver/trilium-py#import-from-obsidian

Alternatively, you could go the other way around: generating Markdown files from Trilium and importing them into Obsidian. I've actually set up a workflow for this using the following solution:
https://github.com/ricolandia/TriliumNext-Toolkit/tree/main/Incremental-Markdown-Backup

Here is how my setup works: Every day, my server runs this Python script via a cron job. It exports the notes as MD files into a specific folder, and then Syncthing syncs that folder across all my computers.( I do not use Obsidian anymore, but It could be a solution...)

NOTE: It's limited to text files only.