Strategic question regarding Notes

[danqi]

I have a bunch of hand-written notebooks with entries that are structured like a diary (with a date and a headline). I plan on transferring these over to Apple Notes so that they are better searchable and safer than in a physical notebook (which can get lost). Also, I plan on writing any future entries directly into Notes.

How would you approach this? Would you create one Note, which contains all the entries beneath each other or would you create a separate note for each entry? The first approach does not clutter my Notes with hundreds (or thousands) of individual notes, but it also seems less flexible.

 

[PhoenixDown]

I would likely use Evernote or OneNote instead.

I would do a page for each day.

 

[iDento]

If it's a diary, the best option I've found is DayOne.

 

[Rigby]

If these are valuable notes that you want to archive for the long term, I would not use a cloud service that doesn't allow you to easily export or back up all the notes (the only option in Apple Notes is exporting individual notes to PDF). If something goes wrong or you hit the delete button by mistake, you may not be able to get your text back. IMO services like Notes or Evernote are not meant for long-term archiving.

I'd suggest to keep it simple: Transcribe the notes to files using a common format (e.g. RTF), and store them in multiple places, including local backups and some cloud service like Dropbox or iCloud Drive so you can view and edit them anywhere. They'll still be easily searchable using Finder. If you want to structure them further, you can use a custom folder structure.

 

[danqi]

Thanks for the input! I really like the control, safety and simplicity of Rigby's old-school approach. It also seems future proof. I just feel that embedding of images and PDF files is less robust when using RTF files, compared to Notes. I often have the situation that I want to save an image or an article along with my notes about it and this seems to have gotten quite good in Notes.

 

[Rigby]

Thanks for the input! I really like the control, safety and simplicity of Rigby's old-school approach. It also seems future proof. I just feel that embedding of images and PDF files is less robust when using RTF files, compared to Notes. I often have the situation that I want to save an image or an article along with my notes about it and this seems to have gotten quite good in Notes.

If you want to embed stuff, I'd recommend OneNote (free in the Mac app store). It supports clipping for pretty much every format under the sun. It allows you to keep everything in a local file that you control (but also supports Onedrive and indirectly Dropbox, iCloud Drive etc.).

PS: Actually I need to partially retract that. The Mac version of OneNote does not support local files for some reason. It can only create notebooks on OneDrive (but you can download the files from there to back them up). The Windows version is much more flexible in that regard ...

 

[danqi]

Thanks, I will take a look at OneNote! (Although, after all these years, I am still reluctant when it comes to Microsoft products.. )