Note-taking apps are an essential way to stay on top of your life. Whether you’re jotting down a shopping list, a to-do list to prepare for a trip, or notes from a college class, these apps can help you save it all. Cloud-based apps like OneNote and Evernote let you sync those notes across all your devices, too, so you can read up on them at any given time from anywhere.

But relying on cloud services isn’t something everyone wants to do. Whether it’s a privacy matter or a simple wish to reduce reliance on large corporations, there’s a genuine desire to take control of your own data, but doing so while keeping all these features can be tricky.

Thankfully, there is a solution, and it’s fairly easy to achieve. I set up my own solution for notes that sync across devices, and all it took is a Markdown-capable app and Syncthing. Here’s how it works.

Any Markdown app works

Obsidian is fine, but not mandatory

Right off the bat, the first thing you need to do to write down and sync your notes is choose a note-taking app, and there are a few options here. There are plenty of apps that support Markdown formatting for notes, but the most notable one is arguably Obsidian. It’s one of the most popular note-taking apps out there, and while it has its own sync service you can pay for, you can use the app for free to store files locally.

As someone who’s only really used OneNote before this, Obsidian feels quite familiar in the way that its pages are organized, so moving my content over was pretty seamless, all things considered. Markdown isn’t quite as powerful as the full formatting tools of OneNote, but it gets the job done more than adequately.

But if you’re not into Obsidian for one reason or another, there are plenty of Markdown-capable apps, and you might not even need to use the same app on all your devices. As long as the app can handle Markdown files, you can use different ones, and it will work just fine. I’ve heard of Ghostwriter for Windows and Linux (it exists for macOS but you have to build it yourself), but you can look around to find one you like. On Android, I went with Zettel Notes, even though Obsidian also exists there. I mostly just wanted to prove that it works.

Sync your data securely

Syncthing is surprisingly good

After installing Obsidian, the next step was making it possible for my notes to sync across devices. For this, I used Syncthing, which is a fantastic solution for syncing data across devices. Syncthing links up my devices directly, and I can create multiple synchronization folders, which sync the contents to a local folder on my device. In theory, I could just set this up on the devices where I want access to my notes, but this would require both devices to be online at the same time so that the files can be sent from one to the other.

Instead, I set up Syncthing on my NAS as well, and this serves as an intermediary. Whenever I make changes to files on one of the devices, it syncs to the NAS, and when my other device comes online, it can pull those changes from the NAS, which is always online. That way, I can always ensure the latest changes can be synced, since the central device in the sync process is always connected.

There’s no official Syncthing app for Android, unfortunately, but there are a couple of forks that do the job just fine. I went with Syncthing-fork, which downloads the entire contents of a synced folder to local storage, but there’s also Syncthing-lite, if you’d rather pull down data from a connected device on the fly whenever you need it. I did notice that syncing was pretty slow and the connection took a while to be properly established when I switched to mobile data, but it did work. There’s always going to be a bit of slowdown communicating over the internet instead of a local network, but it does function.

My notes are everywhere now

No cloud server required

Combining a note-taking Markdown app with Syncthing has made it a breeze to keep my notes available on all my devices, while keeping them under my control. Syncthing has no storage servers of its own, so all files are only relayed between my devices and then stored locally on them, never by any cloud-based servers. I migrated some of my pages from OneNote to Obsidian as a test, and it works surprisingly well.

Edits I make on one computer show up on another a few seconds later, and while it’s not exactly instantaneous, I’ve used Microsoft’s cloud services, so I’m used to that. It works surprisingly well considering it’s going through my little server at home. And yes, the notes even update on my phone, and they actually work just fine on the Zettel Notes app.

I will say the editing view in Zettel Notes may not be intuitive in every case. Using it for tables is a bit problematic since the source view of a table in Markdown is a little disorienting, but otherwise, it works as well as I could hope it to. Adding an image to a page from Obsidian didn’t seem to cause any issues for Zettel Notes, so I really have no complaints based on my testing.

You can do it, too

If you’re looking to ditch cloud-based note apps like OneNote, this combination of Obsidian (or other Markdown apps) and Syncthing feels like a very valid and reliable solution. I was able to set it up and use it very quickly because both Obsidian and Syncthing are easy to understand fairly quickly. I certainly found it easier than when I tried to use more integrated sync methods in Obsidian, and this way, it’s also cross-platform, so I can use any Markdown app I want. I recommend checking out these options if you’re looking for a different way to write down and sync your notes.

Obsidian

Obsidian is a feature-rich note-taking app that’s available on different platforms and offers a neat and clean interface. It’s also free-to-use for individuals.

Syncthing

Syncthing is a synchronization tool that keeps files in sync across devices without relying on a cloud server.