Many teams keep their knowledge base in Notion. A workspace can take a copy of it. Pages become notes in Memory, Notion’s folders become folders there, and each database’s cells become a page holding a table, so “what did we decide about pricing” is answered from the workspace’s own notes, with a source you can open.
The copy is a copy, not a connection. Nothing is deleted from Notion, and nothing the workspace learns is written back into it. To keep both, read Keeping Notion, and writing to it below.
What comes across
- Pages, as notes, keeping Notion’s page tree as Memory’s folders.
- Each database’s cells, as one page holding a table.
- Links between pages, rewritten to name the note each page became.
- Callouts, as quotes.
The notes arrive in Memory under Sources, in a notion folder of their own. That is what makes the move safe to repeat: nothing the workspace already knew can be replaced by a page of the same name from Notion.
Moving it in
In Notion, open Settings, then Workspace, then General, and choose Export all workspace content, with the format set to Markdown & CSV. For one page instead, open the page’s menu at the top right, choose Export, pick Markdown & CSV, and switch on Include subpages.
Download it. A small export downloads straight away; a large one arrives as a link Notion sends when it is ready, and that link lasts seven days. A big workspace can take hours to prepare.
Drop the file into a chat in the workspace and say what it is: “this is our Notion export, bring it into memory”. The workspace unpacks it, gives every page a readable address in place of the long id Notion puts in the file names, turns each database into a page, imports the lot, and reports what arrived.
A chat takes a file up to 100 MB. A larger export goes onto the workspace first: Set up a terminal reaches the workspace’s own shell, and the chat only needs the path from there.
Bringing a Notion export in is a skill the workspace runs, and it arrives with a runtime update rather than with the page you are reading. If a workspace does not have it yet, its own chat says so, and the export can still be imported from the workspace’s shell.
The import is safe to run twice. Notes already in are skipped, and a second export brings a page edited in Notion back as the newer version. Two pages with one title both survive: the second is filed under the same address with a few characters of its Notion id, and a page or folder named like something the workspace reserves (index, README, dist) gains “(Notion)” so it is not passed over.
What stays behind
Notion’s export carries what Markdown can hold. What it leaves out, and what the workspace therefore cannot answer from:
- Images and attachments. Memory holds text, so a screenshot or a PDF attached to a page does not come across. Text and PDF documents can be added to a workspace by hand on Memory; a screenshot needs its text copied out first.
- What a database computed. The export carries each cell as it stood, not the live relations, rollups and formulas that produced it, and not the views, filters and sorts the rows were shown through.
- Comments and page history. Neither is in a Markdown export.
- Toggles. Their content arrives, open.
- Synced blocks. A block shown on three pages arrives three times, as three copies.
- Pages nobody shared with the exporter. A private page of somebody else’s is not in the export at all.
Keeping Notion, and writing to it
Two things can be true at once: the workspace holds a copy of the knowledge, and Notion stays where people write.
- Reading from Notion as you work. The Notion connector lets a workspace search and read the team’s pages as they are now, in a chat, without an export. Connect accounts covers connecting it.
- Putting what the workspace knows into Notion. The same connector creates and edits pages. At Read & Write, an AI connected to the workspace can add a note as a page, a table as a database, and update the ones already there, using what the workspace has learned. The level each connector gets is set where that AI’s connectors are: Permissions has each setting.
The copy in memory does not follow Notion on its own. When the pages in Notion move on and the difference matters, export again and bring the newer one in.