From our point of view, long-term research needs to last not just years, but decades. Long-term research is exactly that: long-term.
With apps and services evolving, devolving, being introduced, and being shutdown, nailing down an app with a wide range of features that will be here in the long-term is difficult to do. Long-term research is a tricky topic, especially when considering it from the ever-changing landscape of the digital world. My personal research database has many thousands of entries in it ranging across file types from web archives to Markdown to academic research PDFs to audio and video. Coming from a formal Psychology background, I love APA formatting, so I want the data I need to cite things properly. I write for a number of sites including The Sweet Setup and regularly go back to my research to find articles, PDFs, audio, and video to use as citations in my books and other posts. I even had a short stint writing my own web-based research catalog for the 60+ books I read in a year. I’ve used Evernote, Bear, DEVONthink, Zotero, Zim Wiki, and others over the years to try and get exactly what I wanted. I’m a bit of a research maniac and have been looking for the perfect research app for years. This is a category that Evernote once ruled, but we think our picks have several advantages over what Evernote offers today.
Whether you’re researching a topic for school, writing a book, planning a big purchase, or collecting ideas for a remodel, we think Keep It and DEVONthink have you covered. We’ve used all of that work and discussion to inform our recommendation for the best app for long-term research on iOS, and specifically, the iPad. I’m more from an SRE/DevOps/System Engineering world and I used to think different here (seen a lot of the f…ups from both users and cloud providers, even as big as Apple).Over the last number of weeks, we’ve looked at a bunch of great note-taking and research apps. skills and profile inside the team, which basically let you to create such a wonderful app in a first hand.
Manual backups also never works good - that’s how people loose data (because they never make backups manually). I’m saying that I need some option to keep multiple previous versions of the data, or I can’t trust the app to keep everything I have to write down. I’m not saying it has to be a separate cloud (and you will loose the key advantage of keeping my data with me only). Thank you for your offer, but I don’t like the idea, not at all - iPad goes to de-wire-ization, and you offer quite the opposite or what you offer won’t keep previous databases. I mean - it must not be on my device… could be an Automator (as Agenda is iOS / MacOS only) ready to use workflow, that will let to upload it on some personal S3, or… I don’t know - some other cloud storage…
I’m not sure I understood how backuping up to iCloud with Apple’s own system works, but I definitely don’t want to plug a PC / Mac on a regular basis just to make sure my beautiful and portable notebook is safe - hope you will understand that I’m looking for something to enable versioning / backups running for me - as it’s all is very important to me, I would like to be sure that even if (when) something goes wrong one day (it always does one day, from my experience), I could recover.Īnd I believe it would be fair if you ask extra for that. Notion.so has an option to setup GitHub sync. Meaning all my notes (and I’ve got quite a lot of things to process in there already) will get lost. The case I’m frightened: something goes wrong - on your side or on iCloud side and the database get corrupted.
That’s the way 1password offer syncing: local sync against a file and wireless sync with iPhone against the mac app.ĭEVONthink have the same approach: You can sync your Macs with a file on one computerĮdit: I wrote that note some weeks ago and found it by chance as a „work in progress“ Although it‘s a bit outdated, I wanted to share my thoughts on this topic. You don’t have to worry about privacy policy if you are working with business-related data because everything is stored locally. That would „beat two birds with one stone“: You are safe to work with you data locally, without having to sync it in the cloud. You only have to replace or add „Folder“ to „iCloud“ / „Dropbox“ in settings. In fact this works already right now: After making changes, Agenda saves it in the cloud and keeps everything up to date. Each device syncs the data and write changes back when the work is done. Is it possible to make this file „more robust“ and foolproof in terms of data corruption or read-write errors? This would be a wonderful possibility to save this data to a NAS and let access all local Macs to this direction.
Here is how to make a manual backup on macOS: