Obsidian wins for now

A few months ago I started playing with the idea of migrating my notes from Obsidian over to Tana. Tana is a fantastic system and a great tool, but I’ve ultimately decided to keep things in Obsidian for a few reasons.

Ownership

While I have faith that Tana will be around for a while, using their system ultimately means they control everything. If they go out of business, or suspend my account, or have a big system failure, all of my notes could be gone in an instant. I kept backups of them, but their only export is a big messy JSON file that’s of relatively little value.

I talk a lot on this blog about taking ownership of your content; I do that very well with this blog, but I was doing the exact opposite with my notes and it just didn’t feel right. With Obsidian, all of my notes are literally text files on my computer (that sync and create text files on other devices). If somehow all of Obsidian imploded one day, I’d still have the tool on my computer and I’d still have all of my notes. I’d likely need to migrate to another system, but migrating from plain text is much easier than any other solution.

AI

To a lesser degree, my thoughts about AI-assisted notes played a small role in this. While Tana or any other system could certainly integrate a degree of AI, it feels to me like being able to…