Hi there! A little background: I write down notes a lot to make up for my bad memory. I’ve been doing this for a few years, and it’s usually a few thousand words a day: some professional, some deeply personal. Because of this, I’m trying to be conscious about keeping these notes private. While I’ve made a few changes along the way to follow better privacy practices, I thought I’d post here and see what other ideas are out there.
Right now, I have a few thousand markdown files stored in iCloud with end to end encryption. It’s far from a perfect system: ideally I would get away from cloud storage, iCloud is closed source, and there’s no native linux client. While it’s more private, writing entirely on paper isn’t an option: typing is much faster, it’s easier to query, and I can do fun things with this data. I think my next shift is towards using syncthing to maintain copies of these notes across devices, as I often edit from various machines and want to maintain multiple backups.
Rather than asking directly for proposed solutions, I’ll ask: What should I be considering? Does the editor I use matter? Does this go down to operating system level? I think the answers are both of these are yes, but I don’t know what else I should be asking myself.
It’s hard to understand what you want. Why multiple devices? Why remote storage? Why not just use your laptop with local storage and encrypted backups? If you must have remote storage, why not self-host it on a cheap VPS? Just who are you trying to protect your data from? It’s a lot different if you think Trump is after you or something like that: you have to check your bed for microphones, rather than just worrying about your computer software.
So far I’m satisfied with just using my laptop for personal files, but if I were more paranoid I’d set up a separate laptop with no internet and take some additional precautions besides that. Anyway, the more machines you use, the more potential security holes you have to deal with.
Multiple backups is just a matter of running a script that backs up to more than one place, right? I use Borg for backup, and pointing it to multiple targets is pretty easy.
I find it convenient to be able to write notes on whatever machine I have with me at the time - desktop, laptop(s), or phone. If I only had one device I used, it would be easier to keep a backup on local storage. With multiple devices I prefer to have up-to-date notes on each device, and so I’ve leaned more towards remote storage and peer-to-peer file synchronization. This does add some security holes, but it’s acceptable within my threat model. Frankly, I’ve never used local storage across multiple devices because I don’t know how to do that, if it can be done with Borg but I will check it out!
Borg is a backup program not a synchronizer. Backing up to mutliple targets just means running a normal backup to target 1, then another to target 2, etc. Maybe what you really want is git. There are also some self-hosted multi-access notepad programs, sort of like how google docs work. Anyway if your problem requires a server or synchronization, look into self-hosting rather than some cloud thing.