What if Your Note App Disappeared Tomorrow?

The Three Laws of Digital Ownership

You are being held hostage, and you don't even know it.

Back when I was doing my PhD, I lived in my note-taking system. It was Life OS, it was my research journal and my entire productivity system. If it went down, I would have been lost months of work, and been unable to write my thesis.

Even before that, I've always been obsessed with finding the perfect note-taking app. I've tried Evernote, physical notebooks (so much scanning), Emacs (tech geeks will get me), Roam Research and settled with Obsidian now. And for years, I poured everything into a single app. Evernote collected my favorite story snippets, it filed my lecture notes, my homework and even my journal entries.

I love having digital notes because now my notes are searchable, they are accessible from everywhere without the weight of carrying a backpack, and they're supposed to be permanent. A forever library in the cloud that we can easily access from quick portals (our phones, our laptops).

The problem is we don’t realize, the risks to our digial notes

The problem is: Our digital notes are actually as fragile as a physical notebook, but we don’t realize. We know better than to put our notes near a puddle of water, but we don’t see the encroaching doom that comes for our note-taking apps. Digital apps do have an expiry date.

Let's do a quick thought experiment. I want you to picture the single app where most of your high-value thinking resides. (E.g. Notion) Got it? Now, imagine you wake up tomorrow and receive an email: "As of next month, this service will be discontinued." Or, "Our new monthly subscription is 3x what you currently pay."

What's your protocol? What's your backup? For most people, the answer is "I have no idea," and the result is being held hostage for the work you have put in. Pay or your life is going up in flames, or perhaps utter disillusionment, abandoning the idea of ever putting in this much work into a second brain again.

The problem of notes you don’t own

Write this down: Your notes are the single most valuable asset you own.

You spend years putting your thoughts into an app. It's not just data; it's a part of you. It's your memory, your insights, the trail of your own personal growth. And you trust it. It has become your dependable external brain.

But if you built them in the wrong system, your notes aren't yours.

You've formed an attachment to this externalized part of your mind, but you've given control of it to someone else. It’s like you have toiled away on a beautiful commonplace book that records every insight you love, but this commonplace book belongs to your roommate, who adds fancy borders and buys stationary too. You can only read it when they let you come over. This was fine, when you were in the same dorm. But after uni, they have moved away, and the commonplace book is gone.

We've traded the physical fragility of paper for the systemic fragility of a proprietary database. It's a classic case of optimising for short-term convenience over long-term resilience. The question isn't if your chosen platform will fail you, but when. And if you haven't prepared, years of work—your "second brain"—could be lost in an instant.

You believe you have a "second brain," but what you have is a tenancy agreement. You are writing in their book, with their ink, by their rules. They have simply granted you permission to read your own thoughts. This is not an evolution of the commonplace book; it is a perversion of it. It is an act of surrendering one's legacy to the whims of the market.

Most note-taking apps give you a false sense of security. You feel like you own your notes, but you are really just borrowing access to them

🤔 Why Your Notes Aren't Truly Yours

Let’s do a quick pre-mortem. What is the single point of failure that could wipe out 10+ years of your intellectual work? For most people, it’s the company that hosts their second brain. This needs to be addressed.

Here’s the thing: most of these apps are server-first.

The two states of ‘working’ and ‘not’ with server-based apps

Here’s the problem:

1. Your Notes Live on Their Servers. If the company goes down, your access is gone.

Server-First Means Server-Owned: Most apps operate on a "server-first" model. This means your notes live primarily on the company's computers, not your own. They are the ones who owns your notes and so if they sell the company, the service is gone.

even if the founder wants to keep, once they sell, the new owners can kill the product regardless of how successful

This does happen. When the company pivots its business, gets acquired (as startups do), or simply shuts down, users are left scrambling.

There is also all the other issues of:

• Server lag + General lag when notes database gets too big

• Data loss scares (See Roam Research)

Roam Research used to be HUGE. Other early adopters may remember losing notes and stressing over what is missing.

• Pricing issues (See Evernote)

In 2016, we got (free = unusable) and (subscribe 🔫). Price now is $130 USD per year

You don't own your notes; you rent space on a server. Most note-taking apps are your Digital Landlord. They own the building (the servers), they set the rules (the software), and they can change the locks or even demolish the building at any time. There isn’t really a tenancy contract. This is the wild west of rentals, especially if the app is free. They have to become profitable somehow.

The last problem with server-based apps are the privacy issues. When notes are not encrypted by default, when employees can access notes (imagine if you stored bank account information in those notes) or the company sneaks in a clause allowing them to feed your data to machine learning algorithms.

2. The Trap of Data Lock-In

It's not just about the service being cut-off or unreliable. It's about being trapped without a good way to leave.

• Useless Exports. Many apps make exporting your notes intentionally difficult. The effort to export (if possible at all) is a deliberate barrier. Sure, they have an "export" button, but have you ever tried using one? You often have to export files one by one (insanity, for anyone with thousands of files) or you get a chaotic mess of files that no other app can properly read.

• Proprietary formats mean you can't easily leave if the service becomes too expensive or stops meeting your needs.

This powerful lock-in creates a strong incentive to stay and pay, even if prices rise or the service gets worse. It makes you a captive customer.

The Friction of Leaving is a Feature, Not a Bug: They make it incredibly hard to switch to a new app. They creates a massive switching cost, locking you into their ecosystem even if they raise prices or the product gets worse. Business is about leverage. They have it, you don't. They built a system designed to for your notes to become digital hostages.

Proprietary formats and useless exports are forms of friction. They are intentionally designed to increase the effort required to leave. This makes you more likely to stick with the default, even if it's no longer serving you.

This is also a problem of company ethics. We can recognize these manipulative tricks that they use and refuse to support these companies.

A New Approach to Ownership 🎩

So, what's the actual solution here? It's not about hopping from Notion to Obsidian to Visual Studio Code hoping to find 'the one'. The solution is to change our decision-making process entirely.

Specifically, you have to change your entire framework for choosing tools. Stop being seduced by creators and their fancy workflows. Your first vetting criteria should be: Will my notes be safe? Will they be mine?

Can I walk away with everything, easily? Save your notes. If you cannot take them away, and still use them, they are not truly yours.

If the answer is no, the tool is disqualified. Full stop.

You need a system where you own the files yourself. The notes should be app-invariant. You should be able to easily move to another app and read those notes.

This gives you total control. That is a second brain that you can trust. This is not a negotiable requirement. You shouldn't build your life's work on a platform you don't control. You need to be able to trust that your second brain is private and safe. Own your brain.

Putting Your Notes as the Main Priority

This is the most important shift you can make. Stop thinking about the app as the center of your system. Your folder of plain text files is the center.

The app is just a temporary tool you use to view and edit those files. You can use Obsidian today, a different editor tomorrow, and a new app in five years, all on the same set of notes. The power stays with you and your files, not the software company.

⚖️ The Three Laws of Note Ownership

This is it. This is the part you actually listen to.

To truly own your notes, your system must follow this simple non-negotiable checklist.

• Law #1: It Must Be Local-First. This is super important. The master copy of all your notes must live on your computer. The cloud is brilliant for syncing between your laptop and phone, but you should never rely on it as the only place your notes exist. If your Wi-Fi dies, you still have everything.

• Law #2: It Must Be Plain Text.
  Your notes must be saved in a universal, non-proprietary format like Markdown (.md) or plain text (.txt). There are dozens of apps that can open these files, many of these apps open-sourced, so you will never be locked out of your own notes. This means you're not locked into any single app. This gives you ultimate freedom to switch apps whenever you want, with zero friction.

• Law #3: You Must Own Your History (This is where the server comes in)
  We all make mistakes! A good system must allow you to save and access previous versions of your work. We all need version control, like git or even just the built-in file history in your OS. This means if you accidentally delete a paragraph or a whole file, you can just roll back to an older version. This also protects you from file corruption, or just disaster scenarios of laptop kaput. This ensures no work is ever truly lost.

  
  Part of Law #3 is having a convenient automated backup solution that regularly saves your work, in a way that you can conveniently access and vet through.

Convenience is King. I have been espousing this on this substack since the beginning but this was really the biggest realization of my 20s.

I used to always push for the software with the best features in terms of having the most amount of fancy features that other software cannot do, which is why I got into Emacs. The text-editor you code yourself.

This was a very bad idea for somebody who doesn't usually code in Lisps and doesn't really want to spend my entire life fixing up my .emacs file. I persisted for two years of trying to get org-roam to work for me, and then finally switched to Roam Research, and later to Obsidian with a great deal more ease.

The solution isn't really to code up your own app because you are usually not a whole development team. You just need to be a picky minimalist and focus on the features that you need. I needed backlinking for zettelkasten notes. Easy tagging.

Little Tangent: About Backups

A system that just saves everything is not a version control system; it's a digital archive. While better than nothing, it fails at the most important task: making the project's history useful and understandable. We want a navigable timeline of meaningful milestones.

Having about a million different version files that are only saved by timestamp doesn't tell you where you need to go in order to find part that you changed. This is why GitHub commits have commit messages. It turns the ‘save’ into a documented event.

You won't want to do this for all your files, everytime you change a note and so ideally, you would have software that shows you how the document changed from the current set. Aka Diffs.

Obsidian has this feature (but you have to pay for sync history and actually set up that vault to sync). With any folder of markdown files, you can set up a repository and do regular commits by scheduling this.

# How you set up the git repo
git init
## You have to go to github (private repo) and set up a new repo (instructions are there)

# How you sync it
git add -A
git commit -m "YOUR MESSAGE - at least automate a timestamp"
git push origin main

🚀 Ownership is Step One for Automated Workflows

When you own your notes as simple text files, you can do things that are impossible in closed systems. It's not just about security, it's about unlocking new capabilities.

• Build Your Own AI. Instead of waiting for your favorite notes app to build their own AI solution and hoping that they picked a model that is sufficiently smart, you can take your markdown files. and put it into a local AI model to do a custom weekly review every Sunday. This gives you privacy & the ability to adjust the weekly review to your needs. 🐶 I can write about my local AI assisted weekly review, if anyone is interested

• Automate the Annoying Stuff: I find it really exhausting to have to open up my Obsidian, look for my daily note and then add an extra line + timestamp for interstitial journalling if I am away my computer. This is where we bring in the power of scripts and Apple shortcuts. The amount of time and mental energy this saves is just staggering. It’s about making a system that works for you, wherever you are. The alternative would be that I won't even log because it is too much friction if it is not a single button press.

♥️ Build a System That You Can Trust

The freedom to choose your tools, the security of local ownership, and the power to build your own solutions. This is what true note ownership looks like. It’s not about finding the perfect app; it's about ensuring your notes survival whatever comes.

This is how you create a reliable foundation for your second brain, to invest in a personal knowledge asset that will grow in value over your entire life. Your best ideas + family recipes will remain safe, accessible, and useful for decades to come.

Your Actionable 3-Question Check-up:

Pull up your notes app right now and ask these simple questions.

1. Offline Access: If I turn off my Wi-Fi, can I still access and edit every single one of my notes?

2. Reasonable Portability: If I export everything, do I get a clean folder of .md files that I could easily open in any other app?

3. Version Control: Is there an easy, built-in way to see what a note looked like yesterday, or last week, before I made a major change? Can I link to my own git backup solution?

If the answer to any of these is no, you don't truly own your notes. It might be a good time to reconsider your setup to avoid any major losses in the future.