DryMind

History of Notes Migration

I started note-taking in analog -a lined notebook. It was more of a commonplace book than note-taking per se. However I liked the process. It helped me to draw quotes and little poems for my school essays. I collected jokes and used them in conversations with surprising effect to my acceptance in social circles.

Then came the first migration - OneNote was a revelation. You didn't have to worry about ink and pages running out. You didn't have to remember where you put it. It was gorgeous too with its tabs and notebooks. To this day I pine for the ability to take notes in a canvas like interface. The fact that my school taught how to use MS Word, MS Powerpoint, MS Excel and others but not OneNote baffled me to no end. I evangelized OneNote to anybody who would listen. However this was the most painful migration. There was no way to digitize handwriting available widely at that point. So I had to type my entire collection, page by page, letter by letter.

It was teenage idealism that fuelled the second migration. I heard someone say that knowledge must be free and in order to achieve it, tools of knowledge must be free of artificial shackles too. So I ditched Windows back in mid 2000s and moved to Linux. This is the first time I understood the value of an app being cross-platform. That was the sole concern and I ended up choosing Evernote for this reason. The cognitive dissonance of this decision flew over my head at that time.

Evernote is probably the longest I have stuck to one note taking platform - around 10 years. This also coincided with the time when I firmly believed all the data should move to cloud. Google was a techno-Messiah. Then I heard someone say something about a concept called privacy of our digital data. I was slowly trying to do more than collecting interesting snippets in my notes - like actually doing some thinking of my own. Evernote gently scared me to ditching them with an update to privacy policy which made an implicit fear explicit - real people can snoop and read our data.

So I had two essential conditions at that point - app should be cross platform and private. I explored quite a bit. Dokuwiki, ZimWiki, and Org-mode gave me the idea plain text files could be more than just text. However I could not find a mobile application that can replicate their features1. I did not have access to a real computer all the time. So mobile accessibility of notes became a critical criterion too.

After a long drawn search, I found Tiddlywiki. It was browser based - so it could operate in any platform including mobile. It was essentially an HTML file that stayed in your computer that you can sync to mobile, so no privacy issues either. Even better - it had an Evernote importer. This made the third migration much easier than I expected. I have used Tiddlywiki as my main driver for the past 5-6 years. In that time I have also contributed to the community in different ways, including Timimi.

Now the time has come for the fourth migration. The major reason this time is scalability. In the last 20 years, I have accumulated over 33K notes. I am holding this over a rather large number of Tiddlywikis. It seemed like splitting data into separate files, and organizing them neatly in folders was the logical thing to do. Forget logical, it was the only way to I knew to take notes. This splitting of data in this form is creating a great deal of trouble. Links across wikis do not generate backlinks. You have to update all the cross-wiki links manually when you rename a note. If you cannot recall which wiki held a note, there was no easy way to find them. See Tiddlywiki - An exit interview

I was really hesitant to bite the bullet and migrate once more. See Sunk Cost Fallacy. That was until the Zettelkasten crowd, Roam cult, Obsidian and Mr Ahren forced my hand, not only to take a look at my note taking application stack, but also to look at the workflow.

See Notes on Fourth Migration


  1. This was 2016. Today Org mode has a wonderful android app called Orgzly, while Zim markup is supported by Markor- both are excellent open-source android apps.
History of Notes Migration