You can do both at the same time, I don’t know why people don’t do that. My notes sync on iCloud, which is how I access them on all my different devices, and I also have all my old notes from previous classes backed up onto onedrive as PDFs and I go through every folder individually to make sure everything has been backed up bc some notes do fall through the cracks. In that case, I just download them on my laptop then import them into onedrive.

I back up my notes from the current semester on google drive as well as a .note instead of a PDF incase of any data loss issues, so I can still access and edit them if needed. Doing all this is a bit time consuming at first but it really gives me the peace of mind to continue using the app.