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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.

Notion backup overview in SimpleBackups

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.

Notion quick access 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.

Notion connection configuration

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.

Notion resource exclusion

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.

Notion backup schedule and storage configuration

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.

Notion run backup on demand

Restore a Notion backup

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.

Notion backup logs

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

Notion log summary popup

Start the restore

Click the Restore tab and then click Restore Workspace.

Notion restore workspace button

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.

Notion restored workspace page

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.

Granting SimpleBackups access to a Notion page