We’ve used various note-taking apps for many years, often relying on their servers. When those servers shut down or experienced problems, we were left stranded without viable options. Even when they offered data downloads, the formats were often impractical.

To tackle this, we decided to save all notes locally as individual files (.space), such as Word documents or PDFs. Admittedly, this method isn’t as seamless as server syncing and lacks real-time editing across multiple devices. However, our real-life experience showed that simultaneous editing on two devices was quite rare.

This approach gives us more control over our data, making it private, easy to manage, and simple to back up, copy, share, move, and transfer entire Spaces. Plus, you can create as much space as you need and store these Spaces within other folders alongside your files

If you want to sync data across devices, you can store the Space files on iCloud Drive. When you finish on one device, iCloud Drive silently syncs the file to other devices in the background. Because it’s in the nature of note-taking apps that most notes are text-based, the files remain small even if you have a lot of notes, making the syncing time fast. By the time you need it on another device, it’s already there.

To be honest, if you have a large number of images, it may increase the file size and slow down the sync and saving process. In that case, you may consider using a separate Space file or opting for another app.