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With cloud-synchronized note-taking apps, your notes get pushed out over the internet and are viewable on any device with the app. If the app stores data locally in a non-obvious location on your hard drive in a proprietary format and some future disaster recovery scenario has you picking through the ashes of your data, trying to find and recover your actual note data in File Explorer will be tricky.
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The company storing the data is the gatekeeper of your ideas. If you use a note-taking app, your notes might be locked behind a paid subscription account and stored in the cloud.
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You can migrate your notes to another app by opening them in any app that understands text files. Notepad lets you save your notes (as text files) exactly where you want them, and you have no one but your operating system to answer to about how you organize, copy, or back them up. RELATED: What Are Character Encodings Like ANSI and Unicode, and How Do They Differ? You Stay in Control Other programs write their specially formatted notes in proprietary file formats or even databases that may not be easily readable in the future. Text files are as old as personal computers themselves (older, in fact), and as long as Windows writes its text files to an industry-standard format like ASCII or Unicode, it’s very likely that you’ll be able to read your notes on any computer platform far into the future. Or subscribe directly on tinyletter.By the way, if you want a quick way to timestamp your notes with Notepad, just hit F5, and the current date and time will be instantly inserted into your file. Subscribe to new posts? E-mail: Yes, subscribe me!
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