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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

For anyone using Standard Notes, how confident are you that syncing will always work and your data won't get lost?

I keep trying out new note apps and I keep coming back to Google Keep and Notion for exactly one reason: deleted data caused by bad syncing on buggy mobile apps.

Latest one I tried was Taskade, and I spent hours copying over all my notes. Then one app update later and the dreaded self-deleting data hits.

So I'm back to Notion again and very wary of wasting time trying out another notes app.

The reason I want to switch: Notion does too much and is slow on mobile. Google Keep is... Google. Plus it's missing a few features I want. Taskade was a great middle ground for me.

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I have had data loss in the past, so "not confident at all" is my response.

The problem was I hadn't found any alternative that "just works", as in stores and syncs notes across all my devices without any hassle. I looked into Obsidian but their sync is a separate product that was a bit pricey at $96 a year. (I got a Standard Notes 5-year plan for $90 as part of a sale in 2019.) Might just move off at this point since I use SN every day by now and I can't stand the numerous UX issues anymore.

Note that with Obsidian you can roll your own sync. I set it up with Syncthing. However it's tricky to set up on Android and when I got a new phone I decided it wasn't worth the hassle to set up again.

When it did work though, it worked well. Maybe I should have another go.

Have you looked at Obsidian? It offers paid sync service which hasn’t lost a file for me for the last year or so I’ve been using the sync service.

At least standard notes produce conflicting copies when collisions occur. Obsidian simply overwrites the old with the new, which makes it completely unusable to me. This is a non-issue if you always have reliable internet connection, but that's not always the case in practice. I don't like the way standard notes handles it, but at least I've never lost any notes with them.

That's 100% inaccurate: https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Troubleshoot+Obsidian...

Is it though? The documentation states:

> When Sync downloads a new version of a file, and finds that there are conflicts with the local version, the changes are merged with Google's diff-match-patch algorithm.

Based on the docs it doesn't sound like you can intervene in this process manually. Standard Notes creates a conflicted copy of the note instead, and that's what I'd prefer.

Sad that it seems like every notes app with sync seems to have at least one showstopping issue like this.

Keep reading man.. https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/File+recovery

Then let us know when your show stopperless implementation is ready.

You can also sync via iCloud for free

If you don’t mind it very simple, I’ve found SimpleNote to be pretty good over >10 years of use. However in recent years there’s been a few issues with clunky sync leading to data loss.

I have also had a couple instances of data loss in Notion, coming back from periods offline.

> However in recent years there’s been a few issues with clunky sync leading to data loss

Exactly the problem I'm talking about. I'll never use another note app that has this issue.

One of the main purposes of note taking apps is to quickly take down notes. If they can't handle that without losing data then the entire app is a failure, no matter how good the rest of it is.

It's like saying "yeah it's a great word processing app, the only problem is that it doesn't accept keyboard input".

It has daily email backups even in the free tier, that's good enough for me to soothe that particular anxiety. I've been using it for over a year with no issues (apart from the buggy mobile client as mentioned on another comment).

The issue with Taskade (and another similar app I tried a few years ago, the name escapes me) was that it tries to sync while I am creating a new note and then deletes everything I've just typed.

This only happens on the mobile app but it's exactly the same problem with two separate apps so I guess it must be common.

Someone below just mentioned that Simple Notes has the same issue, so that's 3 examples.

They really do sell that it will always be around but I don't actually have confidence in that.

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