Just wanted to chime in and give a +1 to Anytype. While I haven’t self-hosted the backup node and I can’t help you with that just yet, the fact that a free, P2P decentralized, end-to-end encrypted and source-available notes app like Anytype even exists is awesome!

I’d be curious to see if you manage to get the backup node up and running 👀

Damn, you’ve definitely put in the work. Thank you for providing such a detailed feedback, meaning that thanks to you this is now the most up to date resource on how to move from Note Station to Joplin for future peeps that have your same problem!

I think you can rest assured that you’ve made the best choice in moving to a more flexible format now, regardless of any future “Joplin vs. Obsidian vs. whatever” discussions that might come up. Because if you’re annoyed with Note Station now, I can absolutely guarantee that moving decades worth of .nsx notes for all your family, potentially manually, would have been hell on earth in the future.

One last experiment, now that you can: Let’s say you wanna move from Joplin to Obsidian tomorrow. These are the #1 and #2 results when searching for “Import Joplin to Obsidian”. Just take a look. It’s almost comically easy compared to now, so I’d say bright times are ahead :)

Ahh yes, the well known dilemma of “data portability”, also know as “If you can’t leave with your stuff, you might as well stay with us”. That’s something I’d definitively recommend you look out for in the future, here, I’ll make the first step for you [for Joplin]:

• Joplin stores all your notes on your device and allows you to export them in several nonproprietary formats, including markdown and HTML, which are human readable and directly importable by generally all open-source note apps. Joplin being open-source helps too, as it means that anyone can directly add new ways of exporting notes into different formats should you ever want to switch. Joplin is not perfect since it still changes your files during usage, but one could argue that it’s well within reason since it adds several features on top that the raw markdown format doesn’t have.

As for your problem at hand, imma be honest chief, it’s not going to be perfect. You have two options, but both of those options will require that you manually adjust some notes, that’s just a consequence of today’s world in which different note apps are built completely different and there not being a universally agreed on format that can easily contain all the contents of a single note in one file. Synology using their weird format doesn’t make it easier either so you’re going to have to put in the work to break out of that file format first. This is true regardless if you ultimately decide to switch to Obsidian, SilverBullet, MoeMemos, Nextcloud Notes, you name it. With Joplin at least, you’ll be able to automate the import of 98,9% of all your notes, but even that still means that you’ll have to manually adjust some notes. Here are your options:

1. Automate the process:

   • There are several scripts that automatically take the Sinology .NSX export you just created, then they translate all it’s content into .md files that you can then easily import in one-click into Joplin. Here are the ones I’ve found:
     • https://github.com/Maboroshy/Note-Station-to-markdown/
       • “It creates md files and puts all attachments into a sub folder.”
     • https://github.com/xinbindai/Note-Station-to-Joplin
       • A customized version of the above script “to export notes/images in markdown + Front Matter (Directory) that can be [more] easily imported into Joplin.”
     • https://github.com/andreas-vester/notestation-to-joplin
       • This script might be worth it if the above scripts don’t work. Some people had issues with this script, but managed to mostly fix them. See here.

2. Copy-paste each note:

   • This sounds tedious at first, but once you get in the flow, it isn’t that bad. It isn’t doable if you have 10’000+ notes, but in my case, I got it in a few hours. Remember that even if it takes you one hour a day for a week to move them all, since you’re switching to a nonproprietary format you only have to do this once and then you’re set for life. This person on the Synology forum had your same problem and ended up choosing this option.

Lastly, my personal experience: I moved from Google Keep to Joplin and I know nothing about scripts or code, so I copy-pasted most of my notes manually into Joplin, downloaded the attachments and added them manually, then reformatted the notes manually. It was a pain in the ass. But nowhere near as painful as importing 1000, 20’000, hell possibly 100’000 notes that will probably accumulate in the years to come. Importing them in a different note app would be straight up inhuman or at the very least impossible without a script, so I’d personally recommend you and your family make the switch to a more flexible file format right now, while you still can.

Good luck!

Dope! Lemmy know (;) if you have other questions.

Hey!

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Joplin has all of what you’re asking for and if you self-host, even a few more big things like note sharing and note collaboration.

As for multiple users: You can have multiple users (“Profiles”) locally inside the app, or if you mean different accounts altogether, you can indeed have and manage them all in your own self-hosted Joplin server instance. Again, Joplin has collaboration and that necessarily entails more than one user/account! But we might mean two different things, happy to help in either case :P

Edit: added collaboration.

I may or may not have been in you exact situation for a while :)

If it’s not too much of a hassle, let us know what you end up doing!

My fellow self-hosting noob, I gotchu!

Here are three solutions that are easy as pie:

1. Keep using Syncthing, but add additional devices to that folder to ensure one is always online and ready to receive and sync.
   • Pro: You can use an old laptop, a PC at home, your parent’s phone and so on. It’s like your own torrent network, as long as one peer is online it will always be synced.
   • Con: Your notes will be on those devices too. But in my personal experience Joplin notes don’t take much space and as for privacy, you can always E2EE them.

2. Use a different sync method that uses an always-on server for guaranteed sync.
   • I used Nextcloud for half a year and it worked flawlessly. I used the free 8GB hosting that tab.digital offers. Maybe give them a try again?
   • Alternatively, for an even faster experience (almost “Joplin server” levels of speed), use the S3 sync method in combination with Storj.io. They give you 25GB of free, decentralized, open-source, E2EE storage. You can DM me you need help setting up the S3 “bridge” with Joplin but it’s fairly easy.
   • You could also use OneDrive or Dropbox and encrypt your notes end-to-end first, but let’s assume you want to try to move away from closed-source services, not the opposite. Although the thought of making them pay the electricity bills without giving them your data can be quite amusing :P

3. Use Elfhosted.
   • It’s a newcomer in the “managed self-hosting” space that specializes in installing and setting-up all kinds of open-source software on a server for you. For some it’s not really self-hosting since you don’t have root access to the server, but at least it’s not “Google Drive” levels of control and we’re trying to get away from that. The guys at Elfhosted give you 10$ for free (no payment method required) to use on all of their offerings and as luck would have it, they also offer a Joplin server instance. The Joplin server instance costs 0.05$ a day, meaning that with those initial 10$ you could try it out for 6 months for free. As far as I can tell, at that price it can’t be beaten, not even by a VPS. I used it two weeks ago and had no issues. You even get cool features like note sharing, multiple users and note collaboration. Or, always with Elfhosted, you could just use a Syncthing instance that’s always-on, although they price that at 0.10$ a day.

P.s. There’s a Joplin community on Lemmy too, at [email protected]. Happy syncing!

Edit: Hell, here’s a fourth solution: Just use something like the FOSS app Round Sync and set it up so that it backs up your local Syncthing folder to a cloud of your choice (like those mentioned above) every 24h, or 2h, or even every 15 minutes. That way, once you come home and power on your laptop, your phone will automatically sync all your notes via Syncthing, but in the event that you lose your phone, you will have a “checkpoint” as recent as you want it to be. This way, you don’t have to change your current setup and at the same time you’re prepared in case something bad does happen. And in my case seeing that “Joplin Notes: Backup Completed” notification every 24h is something beautiful.