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This would be neater as a self hosted system.

I have a haphazard way of managing notes and docs that has too much overhead.

I would like a squirrel program to store and retrieve more easily and will eventually just write one.

I think we need more tools that rely on self-hosting cheap nodes for data where the owner has complete control. Knowledge management systems are really personal and if third parties go away then that is critically bad. I intend to keep this info for 50-100 years so need something that does a good job of just storing to git or whatever and then rely on different front-ends and things that can be run without any third party access to data.

The iOS model is closest to this in terms of data and apps, but is not OSS and I spend so much time in front of a full computer so phone access only is too limited.

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Inspired by the work of the famous psychologist Endel Tulving (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endel_Tulving), I have come up with a simple technique that works for me. I simply keep two text files called "Episodic" and "Semantic" in Dropbox corresponding to the two major forms of human memory. Episodic memory is associated with specific episodes while Semantic memory is simply facts that we have accumulated throughout our lives (not associated with specific incidents). I use episodic memory to record various events in my life and periodically move information from there to the semantic memory. This sounds low-tech (and it is) but it works well for me.

I'm sure more sophisticated tools could be created around this concept.

Do you keep everything in just those files? How are the files themselves structured?

At the moment, these are just text files and I keep all of the facts that I need to know in them. The "semantic" file is organized by topic and the "episodic" file is like a diary. As I said, this is very low tech but it somehow works well.

I'm using gitea to self-host, works well for markdowns and code, but bad for anything that is binary(pdf,media files,etc), because of git, which really does not fit for binaries, and git-lfs is a PITA to use still

Have you tried git-annex? I found it to be a simpler, more git-like solution to the large binaries problem than LFS, which seemed like a centralised system that would be painful to set up.

Git-annex is amazing. It has changed the way I manage my data.

I do the same. I have a gitea instance and all my text saved in markdown in there. I also enabled full-text search so I can find it again. On mobile (iOS) I use working copy as a git client, which handles all files just fine (and also supports git-lfs).

Most of the time I want to attach binary files to notes, so I thought about using a sync solution like NextCloud or FileRun (with syncthing) and just link to my files.

I have something similar (private github, but will move to self host soon).

The binary thing is a challenge for me as well as part of my filing includes always making copies of web sites and office and pdf to check for versioning and edits. I frequently try to remember or check if web sites changed info or released a new version so I need a link and a frozen copy. Git does not like this and gets real big, real fast.

Devonthink is seamless if you use iOS and Mac. Efficient web scraper via iOS shortcut and split-screen support for iPad. Sync to self-hosted or cloud storage, with client-side encryption.

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