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Exporting notes

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Gordon Brander edited this page May 16, 2024 · 8 revisions

Copying notes from iOS

Difficulty level: Beginner

  • Notes in Subconscious can either be Public (on the Noosphere network), or Drafts (saved on the local file system).
  • By converting your notes to drafts, you can access them on the local file system.
  • From there, you can copy/export all of your notes using the iOS Files app.

1. Find public notes

  • A small icon indicates whether a note is Public or a Draft (saved on the local file system)
    • Public notes have a circular network icon
    • Draft notes have an empty circle icon
  • For example, the first note below is a Draft, the second one is Public

  • To export a note to the file system, we must convert it to a Draft
  • Find the note you want to export and tap on it...

2. Convert note to local draft

  • Open the note you want to export.
  • At the top of the note, you'll see a toolbar with the note's address. Tap it.

  • A sheet will appear displaying the note's details
    • Look for the toggle at the top that displays whether a note is Public or Draft

  • Tap the toggle and select Draft
    • If the note is already a draft, skip to step 3.

  • Repeat this step for each note you want to export

3. Export drafts via Files app

  • In the the iOS Files app, tap On My iPhone

  • Inside, you'll see a folder called Subconscious

  • Tap the Subconscious folder to see all of your plain text notes

  • Tap the (...) icon to select files, move them, copy them, or export them anywhere you like.

Syncing notes to desktop with orb CLI

Difficulty level: Advanced

This approach takes a bit of setup, and requires some software development experience, but it allows for full two-way syncing between the app and your laptop.

1. Copy your sphere info on iOS

  • Open Subconscious
  • Navigate to Settings
  • Navigate to Gateway & copy your Gateway URL

  • Navigate to Settings -> Sphere and copy your DID

  • Within Settings -> Sphere navigate to Authorization

Before we can authorize a new client, we have to prepare it.

2. Set up orb on your desktop

  • Clone noosphere from https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/
  • Install Rust tooling
  • Build the orb with cargo install --path rust/noosphere-cli
  • Create a folder to hold the sphere mkdir sphere && cd sphere
  • Create a new key orb key create my-key (the name can be anything you like, but must match later)

3. Sync notes to your desktop

Run orb sphere join --local-key my-key --gateway-url <YOUR GATEWAY URL> <YOUR DID>

You will see output:

In order to join the sphere, another client must authorize your local key
This is the local key's ID; share it with an authorized client:

  did:key:z6MkjFq...

Hint: if the authorized client is also using the "orb" CLI, you can use this command from the existing workspace to authorize the new key:

  orb auth add did:key:z6MkjFq...

Once authorized, you will get a code.
Type or paste the code here and press enter:

Copy the local key's DID from above and paste it into the DID field of the Authorization form on iOS, supply a name for the authorization.

Submit the form and you will receive an authorization which you can copy / share.

Back on your computer, paste this authorization into the (still waiting) orb command.

Once authorized, run orb sphere status to check the local state and run orb sphere sync to sync your notes to the filesystem.

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