Notion

Back up and restore your Notion workspace to your own cloud storage.

Notion is a collaborative workspace for notes, documents, and databases. SimpleBackups connects to Notion through its API to take snapshots of your workspace resources on a schedule. This guide covers how to add a Notion connection, create a backup, and restore it.

Create a Notion backup

Create a new Notion backup in SimpleBackups

From your SimpleBackups dashboard, search for Notion in the Quick Access section and click on the Notion tile.

Configure your Notion connection

Click the Add button next to the dropdown, name your connection, and select the resources you want to make available to SimpleBackups.

Exclude resources (optional)

SimpleBackups backs up all resources it has access to unless you exclude them. To exclude a resource, select it from the exclusion list during configuration.

Configure schedule, storage, and name

Set your backup name to something you can distinguish from other Notion backups. Choose your preferred schedule and storage destination.

Test and run your backup (optional)

After creating your backup, you are redirected to the backup summary page. You can run your backup on demand by clicking the Run Now button.

Restore a Notion backup

Prerequisites

Before you can restore a Notion backup, your workspace must contain a dedicated destination page that SimpleBackups can use to host restored content. Notion does not allow integrations to write at the workspace root, so all restored pages, databases, and blocks are created as children of this page.

Create a top-level page in your Notion workspace (any title works — for example, SimpleBackups Restores) and grant the SimpleBackups integration access to it from the page's Connections menu. When you configure your Notion connection in SimpleBackups, make sure this page is included in the selected resources so it is available as a destination at restore time.

iNote

The destination page is only used as a container. Each restore creates a new sub-page inside it, so you can run multiple restores side by side without overwriting earlier ones.

Add the destination page to an existing connection

If your Notion connection was created without a destination page — for example, because the page did not exist yet — you can add it after the fact without recreating the connection or the backup. Create the page in Notion as described above, then click on "..." on the top right of the page and add "SimpleBackups" in the "connections" options. The page becomes available as a restore destination on the next restore.

Find the backup log to restore

Navigate to your backup summary page and click on Logs. Select the log entry for the point in time you want to restore.

Click on the log entry to open the log summary popup.

Start the restore

Click the Restore tab and then click Restore Workspace.

iRestoring does not overwrite your workspace

Restoring a backup creates a separate copy of the workspace with the data from the backup. Your existing Notion workspace remains unchanged.

The restore process runs in the background, so you can safely close the window. Once complete, the restored content appears in your workspace nested under a page titled:

Backup Restore: <BACKUP_NAME> (<BACKUP_DATE> - #<LOG_ID>)

The placeholders are replaced with your actual backup and log information.

Known limitations

Due to current Notion API limitations, some content types may not be fully supported.

Unsupported block types

The Notion API may mark certain blocks as "unsupported" in the following scenarios:

• New block types introduced after the API version SimpleBackups uses
• Custom or experimental blocks not yet part of the public API
• Third-party integration blocks generated by plugins or external services
• Rich media content from services not natively supported by Notion
• Obsolete or deprecated blocks that still exist in some pages

Restore limitations

• Root workspace and private pages can only be restored under another page
• Some block types, database views, comments, and metadata cannot be restored
• Files cannot be directly uploaded to Notion
• Embed blocks may not render correctly
• The order of restored blocks may not match the original
• Blocks may be split into smaller chunks

Backup limitations

• External pages cannot be backed up
• Blocks in the "unsupported" category cannot be backed up
• Access to new root-level pages must be explicitly granted and cannot be automatically included

Grant access to new Notion pages

When you create new root-level pages in Notion, you need to grant the SimpleBackups integration access for them to be included in backups.

1. Navigate to the page in your Notion workspace.
2. Click the three-dot menu in the top-right corner.
3. Scroll down to Connections.
4. Search for SimpleBackups and grant access.