Notion Guardian

A tool that automatically backups your Notion workspace and commits changes to another repository.

Notion Guardian offers a quick way to setup a secure backup of your data in a private repository — allowing you to track how your notes change over time and to know that your data is safe.

The tool separates the logic for running the export and the actual workspace data into two repositories. This way your backups are not cluttered with other scripts. If you prefer to have a one-repo solution or want to backup specific blocks of your workspace, checkout the notion-backup fork by upleveled.

How to setup

Create a separate private repository for your backups to live in (e.g. "notion-backup"). Make sure you create a main branch — for example by clicking "Add a README file" when creating the repo.
Fork this repository ("notion-guardian").
Create a Personal Access Token (docs) with the "repo" scope and store it as REPO_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN in the secrets of the forked repo.
Store your GitHub username in the REPO_USERNAME secret.
Store the name of your newly created private repo in the REPO_NAME secret (in this case "notion-backup").
Store the email that should be used to commit changes (usually your GitHub account email) in the GIT_EMAIL secret as well as your name in GIT_USERNAME.
Obtain your Notion space-id and token as described in the section below. Store it in the NOTION_SPACE_ID and NOTION_TOKEN secret.
You will also need to obtain your notion_user_id the same way and store it in a NOTION_USER_ID secret.
Click the "Actions" tab on the forked repo and enable actions by clicking the button.
On the left sidebar click the "Backup Notion Workspace" workflow. A notice will tell you that "Scheduled Actions" are disabled, so go ahead and click the button to enable them.
Wait until the action runs for the first time or push a commit to the repo to trigger the first backup.
Check your private repo to see that an automatic commit with your Notion workspace data has been made. Done 🙌

Get your Notion space-id and token

Automatically downloading backups from Notion requires two unique authentication tokens and your individual space ID which must be obtained for the script to work.

Log into your Notion account in your browser of choice.
Open a new tab in your browser and open the development tools. This is usually easiest done by right-click and selecting Inspect Element (Chrome, Edge, Safari) or Inspect (Firefox). Switch to the Network tab.
Open https://notion.so/.
Insert getSpaces into the search filter of the Network tab. This should give you one result. Click on it.
In the Preview or Response tab, look for the key space. There you should find a list of all the workspaces you have access to. Unless you're part of shared workspaces there should only be one.
Copy the UUID of the workspace you want to backup (e.g. 6e560115-7a65-4f65-bb04-1825b43748f1). This is your NOTION_SPACE_ID.
Look for the key notion_user. This is your NOTION_USER_ID.
Switch to the Application (Chrome, Edge) or Storage (Firefox, Safari) tab on the top.
In the left sidebar, select Cookies -> https://www.notion.so (Chrome, Edge, Firefox) or Cookies – https://www.notion.so (Safari).
Copy the value of token_v2 as your NOTION_TOKEN.
Set the three environment variables as secrets for actions in your GitHub repository.

NOTE: if you log out of your account or your session expires naturally, the NOTION_TOKEN will get invalidated and the backup will fail. In this case you need to obtain new tokens by repeating this process. There is currently no practical way to automize this until Notion decides to add a backup endpoint to their official API, at which point this script will be able to use a proper authentication token.

Refresh an expired token

At some point, the GitHub pipeline will fail archiving your data. This is because the given NOTION_TOKEN token eventually expires. Follow steps 8., 9., 10., 11. again.

How it works

This repo contains a GitHub workflow that runs every day and for every push to this repo. The workflow will execute the script which makes an export request to Notion, waits for it to finish and downloads the workspace content to a temporary directory. The workflow will then commit this directory to the repository configured in the repo secrets.

Running manually