Understanding Your Google Keep Import Results¶
What it does¶
When an import finishes you land on a results screen headed Import complete, telling you how many notes arrived, how many did not, and why. A notification also confirms how many were imported.
Reading the result¶
The headline is the count that came across, for example "124 notes imported". If anything did not make it, a second line says how many, and below that the problems are grouped by type with a count against each.
The grouping matters: twelve notes that hit the same problem appear as one line reading Duplicate notes (12), not twelve separate failures. So a long-looking list of issues is often one cause.
What the groups mean¶
Nothing was actually wrong:
| Group | What happened |
|---|---|
| Duplicate notes | Already imported previously, so skipped rather than duplicated. Expected if you have run the import before. |
| Notes skipped, import limit reached | You set a Maximum notes value and the file had more. Run it again without a limit to get the rest. |
The note imported, but something attached to it did not:
| Group | What happened |
|---|---|
| Attachments too large (notes imported) | The note is in warpSpeed; one of its files was over the size limit. |
| Attachments missing (notes imported) | The note referenced a file that was not in the archive. |
| Couldn't upload attachments (notes imported) | The note is in; the attachment failed on the way up. |
In all three cases the note itself is fine. Only the attachment is absent.
The note did not import:
| Group | What happened |
|---|---|
| Invalid notes | The entry could not be read as a Keep note. |
| Notes that could not be saved | Reached warpSpeed but failed to write. Worth retrying. |
| Unreadable archive entries | Part of the .zip was corrupt or unreadable. |
| Oversized archive entries | An item inside the archive was too big to process. |
| Archive exceeds the size limit | The whole file was too large. Keep it under 100 MB. |
| No notes found in source | Nothing recognisable as Keep data was in the file. |
If nothing was imported at all¶
The screen reads No notes were imported, with: "No Keep notes were found in that file. Double-check that you uploaded a Google Takeout export containing Keep data and try again."
Almost always this means the Takeout export did not actually include Keep. It is easy to do: Takeout starts with every Google product selected, and if you did not tap Deselect all and tick Keep, you may have exported a great deal of other data and no notes. Redo the export with only Keep selected.
What to do next¶
Two buttons:
- Done returns you to Integrated services.
- Import another file starts again, which is what you want if you exported your notes in more than one archive, or if you are re-running after fixing something.
Tips & shortcuts¶
- Re-running an import is safe. Anything already imported is skipped, so you can rerun after a partial import without ending up with two copies of everything.
- If you hit the import limit, run it again with the limit cleared. The notes already in are skipped and only the remainder come across.
- Missing attachments are worth checking against the original archive before you delete it: the note text is safe either way, but the file is only in the
.zip. - If your imported notes are not in your main list, look in your archive. Notes archived in Keep arrive archived here.