[PKM] Notion and Downtimes

Over the last few months, I was trying Notion as my daily driver for note-taking, and while the ease of use in it was really appealing and how things are fast there sometimes, of course depending on your internet connection speed, there were some stuff that I loved about Obsidian that were missing, especially the Offline Mode that Obsidian is basically based upon. So on the first of March, I decided to ditch Notion, so I imported everything back into Obsidian into my own Archive folder for stuff I no longer need, and I deleted my account on Notion.

Not even a month later, I saw in the news that Notion has been having some issues with its connectivity, all of the users weren’t able to connect to update their notes, and refreshing the page would mean that all the updates would be lost. Although I didn’t really have any important business notes on Notion back then, it would still be annoying for me if I wanted to add stuff for my study notes, or even journal as I try to put my thoughts in there as much as I can, as it didn’t only happen once in the last week, but twice.

After seeing what happened, I now more than ever believe that the ability to have your notes locally first, with the ability to sync stuff across your devices is more important than the flashy design and interface that applications like Notion and Mem provide. But as long as there is no Offline Storage in your application, as soon as there is a downtime, or even worse the company going bankrupt or liquidated, you will lose access to your notes.