Recently I realized that my personal notes are being replicated far more times than I originally intended. Here’s a concise overview.
Background
For years, I captured quick thoughts in Apple Notes, but as the collection grew into a personal knowledge base, I needed better structure. I moved to Obsidian, which is powerful, yet too heavy for fast note capturing. Looking for a lighter, cross-platform solution with an open API, I adopted Memos as my primary note-taking tool.
Why Memos?
- Open-source & actively maintained – large community and extensively tested code.
- Extensible – rich REST API enables custom integrations.
Replication Chain I Suddenly Implemented Over Time
- I send a note to a Telegram bot built with the Memos Telegram integration.
- The bot saves the note to my self-hosted Memos instance on a rented VPS.
- On desktop, the Obsidian Memos Sync plugin pulls the note into Obsidian, grouping entries in daily Markdown files with timestamps.
- Obsidian Git pushes the notes to a private GitHub repository.
- The same Obsidian vault lives in an iCloud-synced folder, which copies the files to my Mac and syncs them to the iOS Obsidian app on my iPhone.
- iCloud’s automatic backups create an additional copy in Apple’s backup storage.
Summary of Places Where Each Note Ends Up
- Telegram servers
- Self-hosted VPS (plus its own backups)
- Local Mac disk
- GitHub servers
- iCloud primary storage
- iCloud backup storage
- Local iPhone storage
Although iCloud and its backup share the same provider, they reside in separate storage systems. In total, every note is stored in seven distinct locations.
