Importing Notes from Legacy SGN

If you have been using the Simple Gmail Notes Chrome extension for a while in its original, standalone mode — where notes were saved locally to your own Google Drive — you may have years of notes that are not yet inside the Simple Mobile CRM cloud.

This page covers how those legacy SGN notes migrate into the CRM (so they appear on your phone, on the CRM website, and in team views).

The short version

There is nothing to manually export or upload. When you initialize the Sync to CRM feature in the SGN extension for the first time on a given account, SGN walks through your existing Drive-stored notes and pushes them into the CRM. After that, all new notes are saved straight to the CRM — Drive is no longer the primary storage.

Your old notes aren't deleted from Drive; they are safely copied into the CRM.

What "legacy" actually means

SGN has had two storage modes over its lifetime:

Mode	Where notes live	When it was used
Standalone (Drive)	Your own Google Drive (a hidden app-data folder). Private to you; doesn't sync to a phone or website.	The original mode. Still the default until you sign in to CRM.
Synced (CRM)	Simple Mobile CRM. Syncs across your phone, the CRM website, the Gmail add-on, and your teammates.	After you turn on Sync to CRM.

"Importing from legacy SGN" is the one-time migration that runs when you switch from standalone to synced.

How the import runs

In Gmail (Chrome) with the SGN extension installed, open the note panel under any email.
Click the Sync to CRM icon and sign in with the Google account whose Drive-stored notes you want to import.
SGN reads your existing Drive notes and pushes them up to the CRM, one by one. A progress indicator shows how many are left.
When the progress finishes, your old notes are now visible in the Mobile App and on the CRM Website. Going forward, every new note you write is saved straight to the CRM.

⚠️ Run the import once, on the same account, from start to finish. Closing Gmail mid-import is fine — it picks up where it left off the next time you open it — but switching the active Google account mid-import will pause that account's migration.

How long does it take?

The time is proportional to the number of notes you have. A few dozen notes finish in seconds. A few thousand can take longer because each note has to be fetched from Drive and then sent up to the CRM. You can keep using Gmail and the rest of the CRM during the import — it runs safely in the background.

What gets imported

The text of every note stored in your Drive folder.
The email association for each note (so each note still attaches to the same email it was originally written on).
The modification date of each note (so timeline order is preserved).

What does NOT get imported:

Notes someone else wrote in their Drive folder. The import is per-account; teammates each run it for themselves.
Notes for emails that have been permanently deleted from your Gmail may be skipped or imported without a direct email link.

After the import — what happens to Drive?

Your old Drive-stored notes are not deleted. They stay in your Google Drive folder as a historical backup. New notes, however, only go to the CRM.

If you later sign out of Sync to CRM, SGN reverts to writing notes to Drive again. The notes that were already in the CRM stay in the CRM; new notes go back to Drive.

Troubleshooting

The progress indicator hasn't moved. Reload the Gmail tab. The import pauses while Gmail is in the background; opening Gmail back to the foreground resumes it.

I see fewer notes in the CRM than I had in Drive. Some Drive notes may be empty placeholders, which are skipped intentionally. If the discrepancy is massive, please contact support.

I imported on the wrong account. The import is per-account. Sign out of Sync to CRM, sign in with the correct account in Gmail, and run it again. Notes imported on the wrong account stay in that account's CRM workspace until you delete them.

I want to import notes from a different Drive folder. This is not supported. The import reads only SGN's own hidden Drive app-data folder for the currently signed-in account.

Quick answers

Do I have to migrate? No. SGN works fine in standalone (Drive) mode if you never sign in to CRM. You only need to migrate if you want your notes to sync to your phone or team.

Can I undo the migration? The notes in the CRM aren't automatically removed. Sign out of Sync to CRM to stop new notes from going to the CRM.

Will this duplicate my notes (one in Drive, one in CRM)? During the import, yes — Drive keeps the original, CRM gets the copy. Going forward, only the CRM copy is updated.

I never used standalone SGN — is there anything I need to do? No. The import only matters if you have pre-existing Drive notes.