Not to long ago, I made this post soliciting recommendations for note taking apps and y'all came through!
My top 3, recommended by the lovely people below were:
- RemNote by @dgeisz
- Obsidian.md by @terabytetiger
-
Bear by @jackkeller
- note: I should prob mention that Bear is only for Apple devices, my work is 99.99% in a Windows environment, and my phone is Android. But that UI is too. damn. sexy to leave off this list
Since the RemNote desktop was a little glitchy, I decided to keep an eye on it and started using Obsidian as my daily app. Since then, it's pretty much been smooth sailing. I found some great extensions and upped my productivity by with daily notes and rollover to-dos.
Yesterday, things suddenly took a turn. I clicked on one of the shortcuts to open my daily note, and everything was gone. My activity tracking, items for review and follow disappeared. Obsidian had overwritten my daily note with a brand new file.
Today, things got 10x worse when I restarted my computer, opened Obsidian and found that most of the folders had disappeared. I was able to mostly restore them. But the latest files were not in their latest state.
The likely culprit - the new Live Preview editor.
I turned it on this week and it's been chaos since. However I'm not too keen to find out.
And so the hunt for my next best note taking tool continues 🥲
Photo by burak kostak from Pexels
Top comments (6)
I just adopted Obsidian. So far is looking good for me. I installed a few plugins and getting to use it every day.
I keep my vaults on local hard drive, backed up on the cloud. I have two vaults, a personal one that I keep in iCloud, and a work one on OneDrive.
Both mounted on my hard drive. So performance is great. And so far no issues loosing data.
I had a really good impression while taking notes with Obsidia, but I've recently discovered Clover and I'm enjoying it a little bit more. I cannot clearly tell why, but the feeling is better for me somehow. Totally recommend it!
I've googled Clover, there are so many things with that name. I didn't find THE Clover.
My fault, I should've been more specific.
Here is the link
You mentioned you were interested in cross-platform--- does that mean you were using a sync service to sync your files between Windows and Android? I wonder if something with the sync program messed it up. Third party sync services overwrite files, Obsidian's paid Sync feature tends to merge conflicting file content instead of wiping out one file in favor of the other.
Also, you never messed with vault nesting did you?
Lastly, if you were using a third-party sync service, check if it has some kind of version history tool so you can try and recover the files you're missing if they're important.
Hope some of this is insightful or perhaps even useful. Good luck :D
Edit: One extra detail-- I noticed you haven't tried Notion yet. That's the service a lot of newer non-backlink oriented apps seem to be basing themselves on. It's great and has cross-platform apps if you don't mind all of your data being permanently on their servers and being only exportable to a certain degree. It also probably still has the largest quantity of documentation / examples / people to get setup inspiration from out of all of the apps.
I'll also mention that every cloud-based app that's been around long enough has had issues with data loss due to their own bugs, sync issues, or internet connectivity issues. Use what you're comfortable with but once there's a sync layer involved something can always go wrong.
I was using Obsidian until I rediscovered Tiddlywiki.
It works on many browsers and even with Goggle drive or Git Hub.
You MUST check it out.
I went back to Tiddlywiki because I hated having 5-100 .md files in a single 'project' folder. This on top of using Obsidain on several projects I then had hundreds of text.md files. No Bueno!
Tiddlywiki is back as my Goto Note Taking app!