Everyone evaluates a note app on the same three things: how it feels to write in, how fast search is, what it costs. Almost nobody evaluates the one that matters in year three: what you’re left holding if you want out.
You only learn that answer when you try to leave, which is why the question belongs in week one, before thousands of notes pile up and hand you a reason not to run the test.
An export button is not an answer
Nearly every app has an export option. Its existence tells you nothing. What comes out tells you everything.
When you download an archive, look for this: are the notes separate files, or one enormous JSON blob? Is your folder structure intact? Did titles become filenames, or did you get note_8813.md? Do the links inside your notes still point at each other, or at the app’s internal identifiers?
The part people skip is attachments. It’s common for the text to come out clean while images and PDFs never make it into the archive at all, linked instead to an address you can no longer reach. Your writing is portable; your material isn’t.
The ten-minute test
Do this in the week you pick the app. Not later.
Write five real notes. Put an image in one, a PDF in another, link one to the next, tag one, drop one inside a folder. Then export, open the archive, and read the files in a plain text editor outside the app.
The test ends with one question. Does this folder do the job on its own, as if the app had never existed? If the answer is “partly”, the part you lost is exactly the part you’ll lose in three years.
A backup and portability are different things
These get conflated constantly. A backup exists so you can restore into the same app. Portability exists so you can leave.
Nightly snapshots are good, but they only protect you from a mistake made inside the app. If the app shuts down, reprices itself out of your reach, or changes direction, that backup is worthless, because the only thing that can open it is the thing that went away.
Keep two habits separately: leave the in-app backup on, and once a month export and store the archive somewhere else. The second habit takes five minutes and covers the risk the first one never touches.
Where Context sits in this test
We have to answer the same question about our own product, or none of the above is honest.
Markdown export works today, and your notes come out as plain text files. What you’ve written is readable without Context. We’d rather you treat that as something to try than as a claim to trust. Version 0.4 is not a stable release and the data format is still changing, which is a reason to repeat the export occasionally rather than run it once and shelve it.
Run the test on us. If you don’t, what you fail to learn isn’t about us. It’s about who is holding your data.