What Happens to Your Notes If Supernote, Boox, or reMarkable Shuts Down?

If any of the three companies vanished tomorrow, your tablet would keep working. All three store notebooks on the device, and none of them needs a server to let you write. What you’d lose is sync, firmware updates, and eventually the companion apps. The real question is which files you could still open on a computer five years later, and the honest answer is: the PDFs you exported, always; the native notebook files, only if someone outside the company has written a converter that still works.

I keep a git-backed notes vault and use e-ink tablets purely as capture devices, so I think about this more than is healthy. A while ago I ran what I now call an exit drill. I pretended the vendor was gone, unplugged from every cloud service, and tried to open two years of notebooks from each device on a laptop using only files I could get over a USB cable and tools that don’t belong to the vendor. Some of it went smoothly. One part failed in a way I hadn’t expected, and it changed how I back up.

Two kinds of files, and why only one is safe

Every note-taking tablet leaves you with two kinds of files, and it helps to keep them separate in your head.

The native notebook. This is the file the tablet actually edits: pen strokes stored as vectors, with pressure, layers, templates, and links between pages. It’s what lets you erase one word next month or move a diagram. On Supernote it’s a .note file. On reMarkable it’s a folder of per-page .rm stroke files plus JSON metadata. On Boox, notes live inside the Notes app’s own storage. All three formats are proprietary, and none of them has a public, stable specification.

The export. This is a PDF, PNG, or text file the tablet produces from the notebook. Every PDF reader on earth can open it, and nothing about it depends on the company surviving. But it’s flattened. The strokes become an image or a vector drawing you can no longer edit as ink, and the layers are merged.

When a vendor disappears, exports keep working forever and native files keep working only as long as somebody maintains a tool that reads them. Everything else in this piece is detail on that one idea.

What stops working on day one, and what doesn’t

Before going device by device, here’s what a shutdown would actually do.

• Writing and reading keep working. None of these tablets needs the internet to let you open a notebook and write in it.
• Cloud sync stops. Anything that depends on the vendor’s servers (sync between tablet and phone, desktop apps that log in, email-to-device, web access to your library) would fail as soon as the servers went dark.
• Firmware freezes. No more updates, bug fixes, or security patches. The tablet stays exactly as it was on the last update you installed.
• Companion apps rot. Desktop and phone apps that need to sign in stop working. Apps that also work locally may keep going until an operating system update breaks them.
• Server-side features vanish. Anything the tablet sends off for processing, such as some handwriting conversion or integrations with other services, stops.

Here’s the practical consequence: if your only copy of a notebook is inside a vendor cloud, or you can only get files off the tablet through a vendor app, a shutdown turns into a scramble. If you can get files off with a cable and no account, the shutdown is an inconvenience.

Supernote: the easiest exit

Supernote went best in my drill, for three reasons.

First, the files are just there. Plug a Supernote into a computer and it shows up as a storage device. The .note files sit in folders you can copy like any other files. No account, no app, no network. There’s also a local Wi-Fi transfer mode that serves the files to a browser on the same network, again without any cloud involved.

Second, exports happen on the device. You can export a notebook to PDF, PNG, or text straight from the tablet, so you aren’t depending on a desktop app to make the universal copy.

Third, there’s an independent converter. The open-source supernote-tool project reads .note files and turns them into PDF, PNG, or SVG on a normal computer. I ran two-year-old notebooks through it and got clean output. Like any reverse-engineered tool it has to keep up with format changes when new firmware arrives, and a notebook from a brand-new firmware version may need a newer release of the tool. But it exists, people use it, and it worked on my archive.

If Supernote disappeared: you’d copy the .note files and exported PDFs over USB, keep the last working version of the converter alongside them, and lose almost nothing except future updates.

reMarkable: good exit, with a warning from history

reMarkable has a clean answer for exports and a messier one for native files.

The clean answer is the USB web interface. Turn it on in the storage settings, connect the tablet with a cable, and a small web page on the tablet lets your browser download any notebook as a PDF. It runs entirely on the tablet, with no account and no internet connection. As long as the tablet boots, you can get PDFs off it. That’s a solid exit.

The native files are the complicated part. On the reMarkable 2, you can reach the raw notebook files over SSH using a password shown in the tablet’s own settings. Newer hardware makes that harder: on the Paper Pro you have to enable a developer mode first, and turning it on wipes the device. Once you have the raw files, community tools such as rmscene and rmc can parse the current stroke format and render it.

Now the warning. When reMarkable released software version 3 a few years ago, it changed the notebook file format. A lot of community tools that had rendered notebooks for years stopped working on new files overnight. New tools eventually caught up, which is why rmscene exists. But for a while, anyone whose backup plan was “keep the raw files, a converter will read them” had raw files that nothing outside reMarkable could read.

That was my failure in the drill. Some of my oldest raw reMarkable backups were made with a tool that no longer runs on my laptop, and some of my newer ones needed a different tool. I got everything open in the end, but it took an evening, two Python environments, and a lot of reading issue threads. If reMarkable had disappeared right after that format change, there would have been nobody left to write a new converter except volunteers.

If reMarkable disappeared: PDFs from the USB web interface are safe. Raw notebook files are only as readable as the community tools of the day, so keep a PDF of everything.

Boox: flexible, but the native notes are the most locked in

Boox is a strange case, because the tablet itself is the most open of the three (it runs Android, you can install nearly anything, and you can copy files over USB freely) while its native notebooks are the hardest to get out in a usable form.

The Boox Notes app keeps notebooks in its own internal storage rather than as ordinary files you can copy and convert. Its export to PDF works well and happens on the device, so the universal copy is easy to make. But in my drill I couldn’t find an independent, maintained tool that turns the native notes into anything editable on a computer. If Boox vanished, the notebooks would stay editable on the tablet you have, and your exports would be fine. The native format would probably be stranded.

Android gives you a way around it, though: don’t keep important notes in the Boox Notes app. Handwrite in a third-party app that saves standard files, or write your annotations directly into PDFs with an app that stores them as standard PDF annotations. Then the file on the tablet is the universal file, and there’s nothing to convert. You give up some of the polish of the built-in app. You gain notes that don’t depend on Boox at all.

If Boox disappeared: the tablet keeps running Android, exports are fine, and notes kept in standard formats are fine. Notes that exist only in the Boox Notes app are the ones at risk.

The ranking, for this one question

Judged purely on “what can I still open if the company is gone,” here’s how I’d rank them after the drill:

1. Supernote. Native files are plain files over USB, exports happen on the device, and a maintained independent converter reads the native format.
2. reMarkable. Excellent offline PDF export through the USB web interface. Native files are reachable and community tools exist, but the format has changed before and broke those tools when it did.
3. Boox. Easy exports and a fully open tablet, but the built-in notebook format is the least portable. The fix is to avoid relying on it.

This ranking says nothing about which tablet is nicer to write on, which reads better, or which is better value. It answers one question.

The routine I use now

The exit drill changed how I back up. Here’s the routine that came out of it. It takes about ten minutes a month.

1. Export everything to PDF monthly. Every notebook I’ve touched that month gets exported on the device, or through the reMarkable USB web interface, and copied into my vault. The PDFs are the copy I expect to open in ten years.
2. Copy the native files too. Where the tablet lets me reach them, I copy the raw notebooks alongside the PDFs. They’re the copy I’d use to keep editing on a replacement device or to re-render at higher quality later. I don’t count on them.
3. Keep the converter with the files. Next to each batch of native files, I keep a note of which tool and version reads them, and for the Supernote files, a copy of the tool itself. When the format changes, I’ll know which old version still reads which old files.
4. Never let the cloud be the only copy. Vendor sync is convenient. It’s also the first thing to go. Anything that exists only in a vendor cloud is one announcement away from a download deadline.
5. Rerun the drill once a year. Unplug from every account, open last year’s archive on a laptop with no vendor software, and see what fails. Last year it was the reMarkable converter. Better to find that on a quiet Sunday than the week a company announces it’s closing.

The short version

If Supernote, Boox, or reMarkable shut down, you’d keep your tablet, your ability to write, and every PDF you’d already exported. You might keep your native notebooks readable on a computer, depending on the format and on volunteers. You’d lose sync and updates.

So the thing to protect is the export. A monthly PDF export copied off the tablet with a cable and no account means a vendor shutdown costs you convenience, not notes. That’s worth ten minutes a month.