Due to age and the influence of life, people will come into contact with more and more new things and knowledge, and the brain will become somewhat chaotic. I can't guarantee that my thinking will always maintain a high-intensity online state.
Therefore, I have decided to organize a personal knowledge base and sort out the fragments and thoughts in my brain. I will record them in the form of notes and text. However, I have been looking for such a tool recently, comparing various options, but I haven't found one that truly meets my needs.
It would be best to have a self-built note-taking system because today I wrote a private note on Yuque, and perhaps because the content was somewhat sensitive, it was censored and I was accused of violating the rules.
Yuque is currently the tool I am most satisfied with, but my enthusiasm for it has decreased significantly. I'm afraid that one day all the notes in my account will be deleted at once, and I would feel very desperate.
Next, I will continue to compare various options and ultimately choose a platform or a self-built note-taking system.
Blogs are written for others to read, while notes are for my own reference, including plans, to-do lists, and other private content. There are also drafts of some articles and fragmented records, so they should not be placed on a blog.
In terms of functionality, I also have high requirements, such as drag and drop, forms, dropdown menus, cards, and more. Privacy and security are also important to me.
That's all for now. I will continue my search slowly.
Updated on May 3, 2022
After a week of trying and deploying, I finally decided to use Obsidian for note-taking. It can be privately deployed using Docker, with local backups, and it also offers a paid subscription option to back up to the official server. These are two options that can be done simultaneously, which I think meets my needs very well.
The main reason is that I was impressed by Obsidian's features and appearance. The interface is clean and beautiful, and the functionality is not bloated. It has exactly what I need, without any unnecessary buttons. It meets my personal requirements for note-taking and personal knowledge base. It supports bidirectional linking, although I don't need it at the moment. It also supports importing and exporting in Markdown format.
I have gradually migrated my other notes to Obsidian, but currently the only drawback seems to be the lack of sharing support. This is also a certain requirement for me, and I am looking for a solution, but it is not a big problem.
Obsidian has impressed me with many details. When copying a single article, it provides a format for directly copying to other platforms, eliminating the need for manual adjustments.
As for security, it allows setting a global authentication password, but does not support encrypting individual articles.
Updated on May 18, 2022
Half a month has passed, and I have gradually migrated away from Obsidian for various reasons. On the one hand, I have some doubts about the security and stability of the files. On the other hand, there are issues with synchronization, which is both costly and time-consuming.
Therefore, I chose a better software - Obsidian. Its powerful community, numerous plugins, and extensibility are the reasons why I chose it.
In comparison, it is more like the VSCode of the note-taking world, with many advantages. It is lightweight, extensible, and has many plugins. I also use Nutstore for multi-device synchronization, so I can seamlessly switch between my work computer and my personal computer.
Updated on June 18, 2022
After using Obsidian for a month, I would like to share my experience. Overall, it is very suitable for someone like me who records text. It is particularly friendly to Markdown syntax, and the formatting can be customized according to one's preferences. It also comes with some plugins that expand my usage.
In terms of security, it is great to have local and offline capabilities. You can use sync drives or set up a self-hosted WebDAV service according to your needs. It is also highly stable.
As for data migration, there is no need to worry at all. The data is essentially in Markdown format. If you are disappointed with Obsidian and no longer use it, or if you find a better alternative, you can simply copy the folders, which is very convenient.
However, this only applies to pure files. If there are metadata and attributes involved, Obsidian is not the best choice. Because it is a collection of small files, it is different from a typical database.
It is difficult to manage a large number of small files, and there will be performance issues in the long run. Consistency is also a problem. Without reindexing, consistency cannot be ensured. However, reindexing is difficult to improve performance for a large number of small files.
I can understand Ah Jun's concerns. However, we have different perspectives on note-taking. He hopes to create a fragmented structure using bidirectional linking, while I need something like a wiki to categorize the knowledge I have acquired and search based on keywords, tags, titles, and content.
These are different directions, so it is normal to choose different software.