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Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

I've been trying to retain / sync / archive / etc my electronic notes since the mid 1990's - starting with one of the early Palm models.

It's always been a fraught experience, especially if you're relying on someone else's algorithms to give you peace of mind.

The most recent experiments were using Evernote, later Nixnote (because Evernote didn't care about anyone using free software operating systems) I've now moved to a breathtakingly basic platform of Google Keep + script that reliably syncs between several devices, and allows me to pull in all my notes nightly, pop them into git, and propagate to 3 hosts / 2 sites. The same server pulls in and archives my Trello boards nightly, along with a bunch of other more mundane backups.

I've never felt so relaxed about my data.

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Have you tried Syncthing? [1] An open source alternative to Dropbox.

[1] https://syncthing.net/

It's on my todo list (in trello :) ... but haven't got to it yet.

I use a combination of Unison(-gtk) and Foldersync (android) to replicate some quite large data sets between desktop, server, a couple of laptops, and tablet & phone. Keybase and Synthing are definitely on the list of potential replacements for the manual, periodic sync.

How does Syncthing go insofar as replacing a note-taking system (tagging, collaboration, etc)?

There isn’t any explicit notion of collaboration, and tagging can be accomplished by way of a folder structure. I haven’t tried symlinks, which is how you’d make multiple tags work on a regular file system.

Syncthing’s purpose is to ensure that a specific directory remain synchronized across multiple computers and/or mobile devices. It accomplishes this goal with the minimum of fuss, and (in my experience) works better than Dropbox in that it burns fewer CPU cycles and doesn’t crash/hang/nag me to upgrade.

I think when I looked at it a while back my concern was how it would cope with one or more of my devices being off-network for days at a time (a regular occurrence).

The other devices wouldn't be, and changes would only be done wherever I happened to be, but the cost of evaluating this solution was unfortunately higher than not making any changes. As I say, it's on my list. The suite seems to be quite robust - but given Evernote's primary stated purpose was to ensure none of your data was ever lost (and yet many people have sad stories of data loss) I'm extra-cautious about changing my workflow.

Evaluating as well, is your concern that the files won't come down at all?

Or that it'll be egregious when it's time? Solution?

Actually much more pedestrian than that, as I'm confident it works on cases more complex than me. It's simply that I've got a series of mechanisms that work acceptably, and it takes time and effort to run up a VM, set up an archive process, test a new suite & workflow over several weeks.

Syncthing is indeed great, and works across all my platforms very well. It's also still actively maintained.

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