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.
Obsidian is still recommended because it’s a good product, is actively developed, has a strong community, is cross platform, and has good data sovereignty with the markdown backend. It can be easily blocked from internet access (e.g., flatseal) and works fine without internet access. However, Logseq is a good alternative too.
Obsidian is closed source the Dev actively really listens to the user base and its very feature rich as in nothing really compares. Joplin second and then after that you looking at more basic apps.
They can all be private and encrypted in transit and at rest. It’s mostly about what features you want and then once you see what you can integrate you might want some quality of life features you didn’t even know you could want.