Assign identifier to older notes when importing?
in The Archive
Hey everyone,
I've got some old notes that I want to incorporate into my new system. Should I assign identifiers to them or just import as is? Curious as to how others have handled this.
Howdy, Stranger!
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I only started with zettelkasten at the end of last year, but I did this.
After making my own zettels for a while, I decided to go all in. I had a couple notes files that I'd been maintaining for years. One of the benefits of keeping my notes in plaintext all those years was it made it easy to move to the new system. I used command line tools to break the headlines up into individual files, and then wrote a little script that added the UID to the filename and the title. So, on the day I imported all that stuff, I ended up with a set of zettels with IDs like:
Which actually turned out to be really handy in pratice -- the numbers were different enough that they set this batch of zettels apart a little, but not so different they were distracting. As I got more used to the zk system, I was able to go back to my initial batch and make changes quickly, because I knew which ones I was looking for.