## Why protecting Notion matters

Notion has become central to how organizations document processes, manage
projects, and preserve institutional knowledge. As more critical information
moves into Notion, the risks of data loss grow proportionally.

Notion provides platform availability and collaboration features, but it does
not guarantee recovery from common failure scenarios. Standard Notion usage
faces several risks:

- **Accidental Deletion**: Pages and databases can be permanently deleted by any
  user with edit access.
- **Unauthorized Changes**: API integrations, compromised accounts, or malicious
  actors can modify or destroy content.
- **Limited Version History**: Notion's native version history has retention
  limits and cannot protect against all scenarios.
- **Export Limitations**: Native exports are one-time snapshots in generic
  formats that lose structure and relationships.

## Security and Compromise

Notion workspaces are accessed via user accounts, API tokens, and third-party
integrations. If credentials are compromised or permissions are misconfigured,
your workspace is vulnerable:

- **Mass Deletion**: A compromised account can delete entire page hierarchies
  instantly.
- **Silent Corruption**: Automated integrations can overwrite critical data
  without detection.
- **API Misuse**: Leaked API tokens allow external actors to read, modify, or
  destroy workspace content.
- **Cascading Changes**: Mistakes in shared databases propagate across all
  connected pages.

Without independent snapshots, recovering from these events requires manual
reconstruction or reliance on Notion's limited version history. Plakar solves
this by creating immutable snapshots that exist outside your Notion workspace.
Even if your entire workspace is compromised, your backup history remains intact
and independently verifiable.

Plakar allows for direct inspection of backups, letting you browse, search, and
verify workspace content via the CLI or UI without needing to restore to Notion
first.

## How Plakar secures your Notion workspace

Plakar connects to your Notion workspace via the official Notion API and creates
cryptographically signed, deduplicated snapshots of your content. Each backup
captures the complete structure of your workspace, including pages, databases,
attachments, and comments.

You can use Plakar's Notion integration as:

- **Source Connector**: Capture complete snapshots of your Notion workspace and
  store them in a secure Kloset Store.

This approach provides several advantages over native Notion exports:

- **Structured Representation**: Plakar preserves the internal structure of
  pages and databases, not just rendered output.
- **Deduplication**: All content is deduplicated before storage to minimize
  storage usage.
- **Point-in-Time Recovery**: Restore your workspace to any previous backup
  snapshot.
- **Verification**: Validate backup integrity without accessing Notion.

## What Plakar backs up

Plakar captures comprehensive workspace data through the Notion API:

- **Pages**: Full content, structure, and block-level details
- **Databases**: Tables, boards, lists, galleries with all properties and views
- **Media**: Images, documents, PDFs, and embedded files
- **Comments**: Discussion threads and annotations
- **Relationships**: Parent-child hierarchies and database connections
- **Metadata**: Creation dates, authors, and modification history

Plakar allows for direct inspection of backups, you can easily browse, search,
or verify the integrity of your data via the CLI or UI without needing to
perform a full restore first.

## Current Limitations

The Notion integration is in beta and has some known limitations:

- **Permission Model**: The integration must be manually shared with each
  top-level page. Pages not explicitly shared will not be backed up, even if
  they are linked from shared pages.
- **Block Compatibility**: Some third-party or custom Notion blocks may not
  serialize perfectly. Core Notion blocks are fully supported.
- **Media Restoration**: Due to current Notion API limitations, media files
  (images, documents) cannot be restored directly to Notion. You can restore
  media to the filesystem and manually re-upload. We are actively working on a
  solution for this.
- **Restoration Target**: Restoring to Notion requires a valid Notion Page ID as
  the destination. You cannot create new top-level pages via the API.