Export and portability

Your notes are markdown files. Take all of them, any time, from Settings → Data.

Banter is markdown-native: every note has a plain-text form that any editor, tool, or AI can read. Portability isn’t a feature bolted on for exits — it’s how the product stores your work.

Export everything

Settings → Data → Export downloads a ZIP of your whole workspace:

  • Your folder structure, as actual folders
  • Every note as a markdown file
  • Transcripts of your recordings, as markdown files alongside the notes they belong to
  • Your images

Links between notes are rewritten to work inside the export, so the files remain a usable, browsable archive — not a database dump.

What markdown-native means day to day

  • Notes you export open in anything — Obsidian, VS Code, another notes app, or a plain text editor in 2035.
  • AI tools work with your notes in their native format; nothing needs converting.
  • Importing works the same way in reverse: markdown in, markdown out.

The other export path: your AI

A connected agent can read everything too — which makes selective export a prompt:

Read everything in /Work/Acme in Banter and compile a handover document for the new account owner.

That’s often more useful than a raw file dump: the export is shaped on the way out.

Deleting is also portability

Getting your data out includes getting it gone. Deleting a recording removes the audio itself from storage, not just the link to it — see Privacy and recording.