Exporting a Workspace

Download an entire workspace as a single .zip archive — every folder, every document's markdown, and every referenced image.

What you get

• The folder tree, mirrored as directories.
• Each document written as its unmodified markdown source. No conversion, no wrapper, no export format.
• Every referenced uploaded image, bundled into one shared assets/ folder at the archive root, with the image links in the markdown rewritten to relative paths.

The result is self-contained. Unzip it and it renders offline in any markdown tool — Obsidian, VS Code — or when viewed on GitHub. The images work because the links point at assets/, not at MDflow.

Each image is downloaded once and shared across every document that references it, so an image used in twenty documents does not appear twenty times.

Running an export

1. Open the workspace switcher and start an export from the workspace you want.
2. A confirmation step shows how many documents and folders the archive will include.
3. Progress is shown while the archive is assembled, and you can cancel at any time.

It happens in your browser

The whole archive is built in your browser, reusing the same authenticated reads as the editor. There is no separate export server, and no archive is stored anywhere.

Two practical consequences:

• Nothing is queued and emailed to you. The download is immediate.
• A large workspace does real work on your machine. Keep the tab open until it finishes.

What is included and what is not

Included: folders, markdown documents, referenced uploaded images.

Not included:

• Empty folders. Folders whose entire subtree contains no documents are omitted.
• Version history.
• Comments.
• Sharing settings, collections, or favorites.
• GitHub and Google Drive files — those live in their own services and were never MDflow documents.

Encrypted documents export as ciphertext. MDflow cannot decrypt them for the archive, because it cannot decrypt them at all. If you want readable text, unlock and remove encryption first — or keep the archive and decrypt later with the mdflow-crypt CLI, which reads the same mdflow-enc:v1 format. See 06 mdflow-crypt CLI.

Broken images

An image that can no longer be loaded is skipped and noted in the summary, and its original link is left in the document rather than silently rewritten to a file that does not exist.

Export per workspace

Export is per workspace, not per account. If you have several workspaces, export each one separately.

Why this matters

Export is the answer to the reasonable question "what happens to my writing if MDflow disappears?"

The answer is: you already have it. It is plain markdown in ordinary folders with working image links. There is no proprietary format to reverse-engineer, no API to scrape, and no lock-in to escape. That property is why the export exists in this shape.