Ask HN: How do you synchronise your notes?

Local Obsidian + Syncthing.

The magic of obsidian is that I rarely have to actually open obsidian. As the notes are in plain markdown, I usually just do my input from vim or vscode.

The magic of Syncthing is that it's (mostly) a set and forget thing.

The setup works on my PC, laptop, mobile and VPS.

Everything is backed up daily from a single point to a S3 backend with Restic. Also a set and forget thing.

I keep notes in markdown in a local folder and sync across machines with git. I tend to use VS Code to edit/read because I like the way its search feature works, but really any text editor would work fine. I sync with a private github repo, but any git remote would be equivalent.

Git history and did tracking is obviously more useful for text-based formats like md than it would be for PDFs, but there's no reason you couldn't include PDFs or other small binary files alongside your notes in the repo.

Joplin - https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/

I use it with end to end encryption enabled and Dropbox as the storage backend.

Obsidian with Obsidian Sync, because I want reliable sync between work devices and my personal iPhone. I don't use a lot of plugins, nor spend a lot of time perusing plugin options. The one plugin that is crucial to my Obisidian workflow is Omnisearch.

Obsidian + Remotely Save plugin Native cloud provider, sick, utilities, resultant, duplicate files, so I like to use remotely save with the OneDrive integration. You can also use S3 or WebDAV. I was playing with shortcuts on iOS and automated sending articles to ChatGPT, summarize, and save the article and summary IN MARKDOWN to obsidian automatically. Pretty cool.

I would vote for local Obsidian and sync over Git. This works across my work laptop, personal laptop, and my desktop. Obsidian covers: Markdown, note printing, OS agnostic, and PDF storage. You can go for sync + publish if you'd like to sync across devices without any additional software. I chose to use Git which works without any issues.

I use Apple Notes and Obsidian (synced via Nextcloud)

I also use Signal's "Note to self" feature, with autoexpire enabled (I send ephemera to myself thereon - if I haven't used/needed/looked at it in a week, it's not important)

Ulysses with Ulysses sync.

I used to use Obsidian with iCloud sync between my Mac and iPhone. However, I found iCloud sync to be too unreliable, and Obsidian Sync was beyond my budget.

After recently exploring alternatives, I have now chosen Ulysses with Ulysses sync (taking advantage of a student discount at 11 USD/6 months). I write all my notes in Markdown and organize them exclusively within folders and subfolders, without using links and tags. This setup suits me perfectly.

I really like Glow: https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow

Cloud part is done right. No accounts, no emails. Just your ssh key (which you probably already have).

I quite like NextCloud. It's a general purpose file hosting software, so you can dump anything in there. On Desktop I use VS code to write markdown, and on mobile I can edit and preview md files on the fly with the Nextcloud app. And then there's also the dedicated Nextcloud Notes app.

I'm using a Hetzner StorageShare, but you can also host it yourself, it's open source.

There are good Notes App (with syncing options):

  - Standard Notes (OSS, E2E encryption, Allows Sync)
  - AnyType (OSS, E2E encryption, P2P Syncing, Have option to host a node yourself)

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If you want to separate Notes App and Syncing, then you could try following combination:

  - Obsidian/LogSeq with SyncThing
  - Obsidian/LogSeq with Git Sync
  - dendron vscode with Git Sync

I use IA Writer, which is all in Markdown. Not sure if it's on Linux, but it works well across iOS and Mac OS. The notes and attached files are just kept in folders on the Mac hard drive (i.e., accessible via Finder.)

https://ia.net/writer

I email short notes to myself.

As notes are not a collections of facts but interlinkages of ideas I then take time to sit and put them together with a keyboard then save in a directory tree.

I email myself an encrypted .tar.gz of the directory tree at the end of the day.

Software is Zettlr.

Trilium (https://github.com/zadam/trilium) , centrally self hosted, nothing to sync.

Obsidian + obsidian-git extension + github private repository.

It just works.

Side note: This is an extremely well written question. Thanks for covering all the bases and organizing it clearly and logically.

All my notes are in an `sshfs` mount -- it's fast enough for plaintext. The latency does suck though to be honest.

using Apple Notes sync via self hosted mail server. (Apple Notes is doing this via IMAP)

Obsidian synced via iCloud Drive

Google Docs