Hacker News Reader

Comment by kisamoto | Hacker News Reader

Obsidian is great.

For those looking for an open source alternative (or don't want to pay the Obsidian fees for professional usage) check out Logseq: https://logseq.com/

View on HN

Search for “Logseq data loss $current_year” and you’ll see horror stories of people who did everything exactly right and still lost a bunch of data from it. The most recent one I saw involved someone getting on a plane and thus losing Internet access to the paid syncing service. They did a bunch of work as they flew across the country. When they landed and the connection resumed, it synced everything back to the pre-takeoff state and erased their work.

Logseq is so very close to being exactly what I want, but there are way too many tales like that for my comfort. Yes, I could come up with something involving Git or rsync or whatever, but at that point I’ve conceded that I don’t trust the tool. And if I don’t trust the tool, I’m not going to use it.

Ouch - I hadn't heard of that so thanks for raising awareness.

I'm trialling both with syncthing across multiple machines and so far no data loss but I'll make sure backups are in place!

Logseq's native sync now has smart merge which I have found prevents issues like this.

Pretty much a weekly occurrence for my work with Confluence.

Never happened to me with Logseq, also why are we making a trend of something that has happened to 5 people out of 10000 users?

Kind of a bias when you see only horror stories of people losing data, but not the rest who are fine.

This exact issue happened to me. I think it was related to crossing timezones during the flight. The experience has definitely made me think twice about adopting Logseq my primary notes tool.

Logseq is great, but it's another VC-backed app with non-interoperable files. The devs are further working towards lock-in by switching from files to a database.

You can also use Foam, a FOSS VSCode extension that is compatible with the basic markdown files from Obsidian. You can just open your vault in it and it will probably work if you're not using the fancy features in Obsidian.

https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

Logseq really needs the ability to add YAML frontmatter (title:, date:) to the text files. Every text file created by Logseq has a starting bullet point (" - ") because it is an outline. But this makes it impossible to render the file as a web page in a Markdown-friendly CMS as they all require frontmatter at the start of the file.

It's been a while since I've used Logseq, but IIRC you can use yaml front matter. The very first block in the page is special and if you enter YAML there, the underlying markdown will have that yaml block without any bullet points. It renders just like the `foo:: bar` properties.

There was a limitation though that it didn't handle nested YAML. (Obsidian has the same problem I believe though I haven't tested recently)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com