Everything I own, in files I actually own

Ten years, three apps, one lesson

I do strategy work for manufacturing clients, and my notes are the job. Ten years of them now. They've lived in three different apps, and every one of those apps was, for a while, the future. Then the pricing changed, or the sync got flaky, or the company pivoted to something else, and I ran the export and got back less than I put in. My notes survived every app that held them, in worse shape each time.

So when I started recording my calls and letting Paredra write the notes, I had one requirement that wasn't negotiable, and it had nothing to do with features. Show me where the files are.

Where the files are

In a folder. On my machine. As plain Markdown.

Every note Paredra writes lands in that folder as a text file with a name I can read. My Obsidian vault points at it, so the new notes sit next to a decade of my own writing and link like everything else. But there's nothing Obsidian-shaped about them. They are files. Anything that reads text reads them. I back them up with the rest of my documents, and one colleague keeps his under version control, because of course he does.

The sync isn't a buried export button I have to remember to press. It runs on a schedule I choose, from every few minutes to a few times a day, and if I turn it off, nothing is deleted. The files stay where files stay. In the folder.

The cancel test

Before I commit to any tool now, I run the cancel test: if I stop paying tomorrow, what exactly do I lose?

Run it on Paredra and the answer is unusually precise. I lose the intelligence: the search across everything, the questions answered with citations, the map that connects a vendor named on Tuesday's call to the contract from March. I don't lose one note. They're already on my disk, in the most durable format in computing, and nobody can reach in and take them back.

That's the deal, stated plainly. I rent the brain. I own the record.

Ten years from now these files will open in whatever we're all using then. That's the whole feature. It doesn't demo well, and it's the reason I stayed.

What the subscription is for, then

A folder of Markdown is an archive. Paredra is what makes the archive answer. I ask what we decided about the Line B retrofit and I get the decision, the meeting it came from, and the words as they were said, cited back to the source. The folder version of that answer is an evening of keyword search and squinting. I know, because I lived that way for years.

What it does not do

The sync runs from Paredra into the folder. I treat the folder as my permanent copy, and the apps as the place where capture and questions happen. The files are mine to edit, move, rename, or archive, and Paredra keeps writing new notes into the folder either way.

And a folder isn't magic on its own. Point three tools at the same directory and you can still make a mess. The point is narrower, and better: whatever happens to Paredra, to my subscription, or to the next ten years of software churn, my record sits in the one format that has never lost.