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.

  • SleepyPie@lemmy.world
    9·
    3 days ago

    Consider installing NextCloud on a private virtual Ubuntu/debian server. You can deploy it via docker or other various ways to make this easy.

    This can essentially grant you full control over your data as long as you trust wherever you host the server. You can install other open source apps on top of it - like only office which can give you live shared file editing like google drive or one drive.

    Nextcloud has phone app access. NextCloud supports markdown. NextCloud is fully open source, and actively developed due to enterprise support contracts, kind of like Fedora. You could secure access over the internet through a VPN, https and every other hardening scheme.

    If you don’t trust any infrastructure then host it on a laptop, so many reliable used devices can be picked up for cheap. Expand to other devices for redundancy as you become comfortable.

    Feel free to create accounts for family and people you trust, freeing your community from monopoly.

    Ask ChatGPT for the steps in between. This is my personal set up, feel free to ask me any questions ChatGPT can’t help with, though I may be slow to answer.