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.
What’s your current note taking process? Like do you pull out your phone and type stuff into it or do dictation or what?
I went the other direction and have a composition book or two a year worth of notes. If I want to give one to someone I just tear out a page. If I want to send one in email or a message I just take a picture of it.
I keep a little pocket notebook in my pocket and a big composition book in my computer bag.
What got me to that point, and the reason I asked about your current note taking, is trying to find what you’re talking about and realizing that it’s a pain in the ass, I don’t really use it or want to use it, it’s too ungainly to draw or scribble in, I don’t like it and it’s never at hand when I need it.
A little pad of paper in my back pocket, a pen and a sharpie in some other pocket and taking a few minutes a day to copy (manually sync lol) what gets jotted down in the moment to the composition book is easier and more manageable for me than a complex system that requires a computer.
I was just in a major natural disaster last year and while there were lots of things I didn’t prepare for and couldn’t have imagined, paper notes kept me sane and worked phenomenally.
I do keep a physical journal on me, and I love it! It’s great for sketching, mapping out thoughts with others, and quick writing on the go, but it doesn’t fit this use case.
Given the volume of writing I do, I don’t think hand-writing is feasible. The last few years average out to about 2000 words a day, and most of it is done on computers where I can comfortably type for long periods, and much faster than I could write by hand.
In addition, I need something queryable. Beyond just a ctrl+f search across my notes, I embed all of my notes and store in a vector db so I can group by semantic similarity.
That makes a lot of sense.
TBH, I would go with a cloud service in your situation. You’re using icloud now and if you can avoid changing away from it you should. Theres a snap (ugh) that purports to do this natively, but even on a nearly 15 year old thinkpad I can spare the clock cycles and memory to bring osx up in a vm and do it normal style.
I say a service, and you said you’re interested in syncthing (which is very useful) but I’d stick with icloud or something more like it.
I was in a disaster we never thought would happen. My self hosted server was rendered inoperable by it. My offsite backup on the other side of the county was completely destroyed. If it weren’t for cloud backups I’d have lost data. Connectivity was sparse and if I had been privacy focused in the immediate hours I would have recognized then that it was entirely provided by spare bits of dubious infrastructure brought in by the government.
Cloud services like bitwarden and icloud saved by butt. They were prepared for this unimaginable situation to a degree I couldnt have been. When I had a dead phone battery and no laptop, both were able to be accessed securely on other people’s computers and public terminals.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the privacy aspect. Once you have ADP on in iCloud you’re safe from lawful orders and interception is handled by transport encryption like tls, wireguard or whatever. Your pc is a concern but open source versus closed source isn’t the security panacea people make it out to be.
An open source package called winring0 -yes really, it says it in the name- that was abandoned by its developer 15 years or so ago for being a terrible security nightmare was found recently to be in lots of windows rgb drivers shipped by manufacturers today.
That is to say, you can’t really protect yourself from manufacturer and maintainer error or maliciousness. You choose to trust them and have to accept what you get until it’s too spicy and the whole system needs to be ripped out and replaced.
What I would do for privacy is audit my behavior and set up key (or password!) rotation. It’s easy to make sure your secrets are isolated from each other and regularly changed.
If you’re really concerned then make sure you have whole disk encryption (and understand how to recover data from the encrypted disk when the computer it’s attached to fails!). If that doesn’t feel like enough, store your db and any flat files encrypted as well.
In short, don’t change your working system. Change the way you interact with that system to meet your new needs.
I write everything longhand. Many people have been writing entire books longhand, and have been doing it for centuries. And a few of us still do ;)
Depends what you want to write, but speed may not be the key elements. Obviously, with tight deadlines from your publisher it may be a valid point but (I’m 50+) along the years I realized I would save more time by writing slowly but then spend less time rewriting/editing (less, as editing is still an essential part).
All of that to say: sure, digital technology may be a great help but it is not a necessity (unlike what big tech want us to believe). Tolstoy did not use a computer, neither did Flaubert, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, nor did Nietzsche or Plato (to name just a few authors that have written a lot). It’s mostly a question of habits, aka developing the hand, arm and shoulder muscles used to write, and of endurance: the more you will write by hand, the longer you will be able to write without feeling too much fatigue. And of organization—aka, how you take your notes and maybe how your organize them. When I draft a text or take notes on the go, something I do every single day of the year, I use my own shorthand which helps me saves a lot of time. I also organize all my notes (research and personal alike) in an analog system that has been formalized many years ago: Zettelkasten. It works wonders and, in its way, it’s easily ‘searchable’.
One last suggestion: using the right writing tool may help a lot in reducing fatigue too. Have you tried using a decent fountain pen (with good quality paper)? But enough about handwriting :p
If you’re using iCloud, have you activated the optional Apple’s Advanced Data Protection? It ensures that no one, supposedly not even Apple can read your files on iCloud.
For anything digital (I draft longhand but I still need to type the final version), the moment I became privacy-conscious, my solution was to switch from Mac to a Linux PC, with full disk encryption. With This Linux PC there is no tracking and no telemetry (I was horrified to realize the volume of data that was send back to Apple by my Mac, it’s easy to test it: install LittleSnitch and tell it to not let apple’s services connect to the web. Sure most of it is probably fine. But probably was not enough for me) and I can use VSCodium (a Microsoft-free version of VSCode) for Markdown and LibreOffice Writer for word processing. For cloud storage, I would suggest Filen.io a small German company that offers zero knowledge end-to-end encryption.
I think many dedicated journaling apps (like DayOne on iOS/Mac) do offer password-protection but I have no idea how reliable it is. I would rather trust some Free/Libre software and the community to tell me what is safe.
BTW, feel free to come say hi to our small !journaling@sh.itjust.works community (I’m the admin). As an analog user myself, I would love to have more digital users participating. Well, to be perfectly honest I would love to have more people participating, digital or not ;)
Thanks a bunch for the detailed response! That community looks lovely, I joined and will hopefully be active in it in the future.
As far as physically writing, maybe big tech has already gotten to me but the idea of writing digital notes is much preferable. I’m sure I could definitely get more comfortable writing by hand and organizing in a zettelkasten, but for the moment I really enjoy markdown. Takes up less space, I can make backups, and I can do fun analysis with my notes. The other day I made a github commit-inspired graph of my writing frequency over time, and I don’t see a way I can easily do that with physical notes.