Community resources: Importing from Roam

Here are some tips gathered from actual Roam users who made the transition to Tana and made guides to help others follow their footsteps:

1. Ness Labs wrote a comprehensive article for anyone considering making the switch from Roam to Tana, and offers basic instructions as well.
2. Lukas aka CortexFutura made a video clearly explaining the process of migrating from Roam to Tana, addressing the few differences and incompatibilities to take into consideration.
3. Roam graphs are highly customized to the individual's work and may not map 1:1 with Tana, so community member Shashank outlined tips on how to do some very helpful preprocessing of your Roam graph before exporting.
4. The original video by Tana team member Stian Håklev that demonstrated importing Roam graphs to Tana

Preprocessing by Shashank

Depending on whether you used attributes/tags/pages/nested pages, I can think of the following formats [[page]] , #page , #[[page]] , [[[[page]] [[page1]]]] , #[[[[page]] [[page1]]]] , page:: (are there more?!🤪)

All of these are perfectly handled by Tana. eg: #page and #[[page]] will be converted to an alias #page which points to the node page. In Tana you can remove this alias to turn #page into page by taking the cursor into #page, pressing Ctrl+K, typing "Remove alias for reference". However, I don't know if this can be done in bulk.

Solution: do this in bulk within Roam using Fabrice Gallet’s Find & Replace extension in Roam Depot. In this extension's settings there's a simple "Allow 'Whole Graph' Find & Replace" toggle, switch it on.

Now, go back to your graph, press Ctrl+P, type "Find &.." you'll see the "Find & Replace in Whole graph option".

Choose that, click, you'll see a blue pop-up. Now do your thing. turn #[[page]], #page into [[page]].

This was a simple example. There's regex support too.