Notes

A detailed guide on how I organize my notes without vendor lock-in and keep them backed up and accessible as part of a greater whole

     notes how-to organization personal archive

The End-goal

What makes the perfect system? It must be

The Solution

Many note-taking apps which are free and maybe also open-source use markdown organized into sub folders. This hits many of the above criteria, and allows you to choose to use helpful software or simply do things the old-fashioned way. Regardless, markdown provides a simple set of options so that your notes can have headings, subheadings, italic, bold, tables, links, pictures, without being too complex. Although it came about in 2004, the format has become ubiquitous. It can be readable even in plaintext, and is so simple it could easily be converted if for some reason that was necessary in the future

Versioning and backup is done with git. If you are not familiar with git, this tool may be a steep learning curve. I believe you should still consider learning it, because with git you will be able to copy the notes folder to a trusted safe place, and be able to edit them on multiple devices keeping everything in sync. In addition, should anything happen erroneously, you can roll back to a previous state. Furthermore, you can choose to share the git repository with private trusted individuals who can have varying levels of access to it, so like read-only or be able to add and collaborate. You could also choose to make the whole thing public. Git has been around since 2005, and although it may not be the de-facto in 75 years from today, it can be replaced with something else without affecting the underlying organization or software dependencies outside of git

Both git and markdown are very widely supported, and with nearly 2 decades under their belt at the time of writing, I can be confident they will continue to be supported for much farther into the future

For software, at the present moment I am using Obsidian because the UI is beautiful, it supports the markdown/sub-folder combination, and of course is free, extensible with plugins, and overall well-built. By using Obsidian, I can set preferences that make it so that I can paste an image directly into the editor, and it will store it in a predictable place and automatically write the markdown to display it. This makes it feel natural. Searching is done elegantly in the UI, and makes it snappy to access notes based on bits you might remember. If you’re savvy with the command line, using the grep tool can also work here

Obsidian exists as a mobile app as well, but I’ve experimented with accessing the git repository and using Spck Editor, a text editor which supports git, and it worked quite nicely to prove that Obsidian is a tool to improve the experience but not required at all