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Comment by NalNezumi | Hacker News Reader

The thing that stops me from moving to Notion seems to be tied to their business limit and technical limit: offline mode and latency. Any note taking/knowledge base platform needs to be able to open quickly. The UI taking a couple of seconds to load when VIM or <insert ANY editor> is only constrained by how fast you can click Alt+Tab. That small annoyance can be enough to kill whatever idea/flow in the meeting.

Offline mode. Notion have so far went down twice, longer than 8h. Loosing ALL your notes and knowledge bits with 0 backup plan, all in the mercy of a small company was the first true moment I realized how much "put stuff in the cloud" was a stupid idea unless it's on a too big to fail platform (Google/Apple)

Bugs my mind why their reactions to above often complained features have been "meh". All I can deduce is that their business model relies on keeping it online / central and how the tech is set up, it's not trivial to do it offline

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> Loosing ALL your notes and knowledge bits with 0 backup plan

Shameless plug: Since Notion has released their API, I've been working on a tool to automatically back up workspaces. I use Notion a lot, both personally and professionally, and it low-key scares me that it could all be gone.

It's still in beta (as Notion's API), and there's a lot of work to be done, but at least for me, it's better than hoping it all won't blow up one day (and I'm too disorganized to regularly export workspaces).

https://notionbackups.com

Nice job! You should limit that $6 a month based on the # of blocks. I could see some more "enterprise" type customers using this and you'd want a way to push them in to a much higher price point.

Thanks!

I see your point and agree with your assessment. I simply decided to release it early to get feedback and squash bugs, hence the single discounted plan.

I do plan on having at least two tiers and yearly subscriptions once the product matures.

Nice tool, I've signed up. Question: I've selected the pages that I need backed up (i.e. all of them). When I add more pages in Notion, will they automatically be backed up too?

Thanks!

Unfortunately, no, you'll have to add them manually from the Share menu in Notion.

I'll include it in docs.

Regarding latency, when is the last time you tried notion? I used it a couple years ago, but stopped because I found it too slow. Recently I read a blog post from them about how they have been addressing the latency issues so I tried it out again. It feels significantly faster. Pages open up instantly for me now. Might be worth trying it out again, unless the offline issues are a deal breaker for you

Perhaps it depends on your frame of reference. For me speed is still a detracting factor. I'm using the mac standalone app, just clicked around a bit, and many pages (with nothing more than 1 page of text) still get a loading spinner. Typing 3 letters in search also takes ~1s to see the first result.

I suspect actually this is the same issue as the offline thing: every interaction has networking.

I'm using it (in a browser tab) and I still find it very slow. This is the reason that I don't enjoy using it and have not expanded my use of it.

One thing Notion has going for it is: it's quite easy to backup all notes, with a single click you can request a zip of everything in readable form. I do this monthly, but you could do it more often obviously.

This is something Evernote has broken lately, there no way (I know of) to backup everything at once there, and I fear that every VC-backed app will sooner or later see that as a way to improve lock-in....

You are right. Evernote should be able to generate a backup, a zip file with an enex file per folder.

Same for Confluence, the latency just kills it.

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