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Comment by farnsworth | Hacker News Reader

I remember the day a year and a half ago when I went out apartment hunting in a new town, looking at my notes on apartments in Evernote's Android app. It was a complex note, with lots of text in deep hierarchies of bullet points. At one point I tried to edit it, and after a few visual glitches, the text of the note disappeared. Then it synced, and there was no undo or history option in the app as far as I could tell.

I was able to get the note back by driving back to my hotel, retrieving my laptop where the note was cached, and opening Evernote while offline to ensure it wouldn't sync and wipe out that copy. Pretty frustrating. I've learned some tough lessons about cloud services and free stuff.

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I use nvALT (http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/). It's a Notational Velocity fork that syncs with SimpleNote. Since it saves the notes in text files, I have put them in a Dropbox folder. The notes directory is itself a git repo which is committed every hour with a cron job on my laptop. It's actually working out pretty well. I have double backup (Dropbox and Simplenote) with infinite versions through Git. If any one of these services loses my notes, I still have them on my laptop. I could also push it go Github, but I haven't gone that far yet.

However, this setup doesn't do pictures and audio notes, but I don't really need them very much.

I don't think it's a good idea to store a .git folder in Dropbox. Dropbox doesn't know how to resolve conflicts deep in git internal files and will break your repository.

I love nvAlt though. Been using it for years and never had any data loss.

I actually had my entire workspace in Dropbox for the fear of losing data, and Dropbox handled git fine. As long as the files are small enough, Dropbox does a great job of getting the file up as fast as possible so that conflicts generally don't happen.

Still risky though.

Since most of my changes to the notes happen on one device (my laptop), I have never had any conflicts. Using nvALT on different computers sharing the same notes folder through Dropbox does have some problems which the nvALT website recognizes as well.

Someone should realise that "syncing a doc to nothing" is 99.9% of times, the result of a bug

Nobody does that, they delete the doc, they don't erase the contents of it

Generally true but my grocery shopping Evernote note is an exception: I erase the contents and add some new content.

I'm hoping someone does a cloud service for note syncing using a code control back-end. I would really love to be able to look at the changes and rollback a change or delete.

What I'm using: org-mode + MobileOrg[1] + Dropbox, and a few times a day checking my .org files into a Bitbucket private repo.

And it's all free! Though obviously you could use paid Dropbox and Bitbucket/GitHub accounts as well.

Until fairly recently I used OmniFocus and Evernote, in conjunction with their mobile offerings, but I don't think I'll be looking back anytime soon.

[1] http://orgmode.org/

[&] http://mobileorg.ncogni.to/

Oh, MobileOrg is back! That's great news!

A bit disappointing that mobileorg hasn't been updated since June

+1 for Orgmode. Its wealth of features is astonishing. And it just gets better and better; the community supporting it and driving ongoing development is fanatically committed. Bonus: it comes with a pretty good text editor. :)

google docs?

I find it a bit clunky for simple text notes - I wish they had a text document type.

I did lose one Google doc once (a drawing). About a year or so later it turned up again, really odd.

It isn't particularly robust but if you pay for prime, Evernote offers version control (on some platforms/clients).

Microsoft already has. OneNote supports page versioning, edit history, and deleted pages go into a 'Recycling Bin' for 30 days before being deleted permanently. If you sign into OneNote with a Microsoft account, you get auto-syncing to SkyDrive.

They also have pretty snazzy Android and iOS apps for OneNote, although IIRC the mobile apps require an Office 365 subscription.

Out of everything that comes out of Redmond, OneNote is definitely one of the best consumer products.

Though OneNote lacks the integration of Evernote. Evernote is integrated with many services and apps (IFTTT, Drafts, many other writing apps) which OneNote lacks.

Just wondering. A simple git frontend could do that pretty well - just strip it down to message-free one file commits.

That enables you to display the history of a file by handling the output of <git log $file> without confusing the user too much (it's linear, just like his changes), you get full reverts, syncing (push if you have internet), multi-device-support (clone). You'd even be independent from the actual repository host with the app itself, since git doesn't care about it's remote location.

It sounds like a pretty good idea just from thinking about it for a minute.

There was a post yesterday about using private gists as to-do lists.

I'm working on an android app that will sync to a git repository. The very basics are working. Been putting off the sync settings UI, though.

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