> 3. Obsess about backing up all of your org files because if you ever lose them you will literally have lost half of what you know.

I guess this is where the original roamresearch.com is hoping to make their money.

It's also why I won't use them, because I see my notes as a decades-long project, and I have no guarantee they'll be there for long.

Plus I avoid anything that's associated with the word cult, and they quite literally refer to their community as a RoamCult. (The title of forum.roamresearch.com is "Roam Research - Home of RoamCult".)

> Plus I avoid anything that's associated with the word cult

A little superstitious, don't you think?

what's superstition got to do with that?

It tells you something about how Roam Research marketing people view their power users. I think I'd avoid it for the same reason.

It was mostly a joke meant to play off the idea that avoiding a cult because it's something like superstitious is itself a superstitious action.

But since the joke didn't go over and I'm in explainer mode anyway, the kernel of truth in the joke is simply that the word cult here is obviously a tongue in cheek reference to how excited the early adopters are about the tech, and acting like it's evidence of some deeper shadiness is probably assigning more meaning to the word/phenomenon than it deserves. And changing one's behavior as though the meaning they imagine is real, well... there's a word for that ;)

Having checked out both Roam Reserach and org-roam, I'm still surprised by the existence of the former.

The core idea is literally bolting backlinks on top of Workflowy. How is it you can make a business out of that? How is it that the idea is only now reaching viral popularity, even though its a rather obvious concept that had various well-known incarnations in the past (e.g. automated "pingbacks" on blogs in the 2000s), was fully conceptualized into an even better idea all the way back in the 1970s (Xanadu's transclusions), and probably traces its lineage all the way to ancient Sumeria. I sometimes don't understand the lifecycle of ideas and tools in our reality.

(That's not a jab at Roam Research folks. I congratulate them on building a successful piece of software. Though I'm not going to use it anyway, because I like to own my data.)

I think if you look at the landing page of Roam Research and org-roam you already know why the first one is popular with regular people and not the latter one.

On org-roam there's also no quick way to get started and the install instructions look like this: https://www.orgroam.com/manual/Installation.html#Installatio... so it's not really a surprise that's it not going viral and being used by everyone.

I'm not surprised org-roam isn't going viral (and actually it is, within the population of org mode users!). I'm surprised you can make a startup out of a single, simple idea that is automatically tracking backlinks.

To borrow a phrase from discussions around Dropbox, this most definitely is a feature, not a product.

It's definitely just a feature - but a very liberating one. Not having to worry so much about how you organize your files and where to put stuff is such a relief.

But I think it's too early to call roam, the startup, a success. It has some mindshare, but the product has no defensibility. It's not that complex. A competent developer can probably build a clone of Roam in 1-2 months of full-time work. A lot of copycats have started already and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years it's not Roam that has won but just another copycat that had a better UI. Kind of reminds of how Slack killed that other app before it... was it... hipchat?

I tried it and loved it but the pricing model and fact that it is hosted made me stop using it. I have nothing against either choice, they are just not right for me.

The takeout option lets you download a copy of your files at any time but they also often have sync issues, etc. As far as I can tell, they make heavy use of local browser storage which syncs to a cloud back up. People keep seeing data loss (or did when I stopped following them) when this connection fails. Is it growing pains? Yes, probably. Is it right for me when this risk can lead to data loss and not just a conflict resolution process? No.

I do wish them luck and am looking forward to the various local clones getting better (org-roam, Obsidian, etc... no shortage).

I've been using it daily for a few months and haven't had a single issue. Perhaps the server load also went down when they introduced the pricing. I do download my data every few days or so just in case.

Personally I'm not a fan of the company, culture, and the cult-like following Roam has. I hope somebody else succeeds and takes over the market and I'll move there. But so far roam is the best life/knowledge management app I've used, and I've tried a lot of them.

It's not perfect because the wrong keystroke sequence can cause you to lose a chunk of information in a way that goes unnoticed for a long period of time (or is just never noticed), but I run a cron job that just blindly checks in any new files and diffs into git every few minutes. It assuages at least some of my concerns about org-roam's many ways to cut myself with its magic.

> 3. Obsess about backing up all of your org files because if you ever lose them you will literally have lost half of what you know.

Do you use version control to backup org-mode, or opt for some Google Drive/Dropbox/Nextcloud scheme?

I don't trust myself to remember to commit changes, so rely on regular btrfs-based snapshots via http://snapper.io/ .

For other uses, I’ve defined cronjobs similar to:

  0 0 * * * cd /foo; git add -A && git commit -m $(date) && git push

Voila! Nightly snapshots pushed to another server.

I use syncthing on a NAS device in my house. That's a 2-bay NAS in RAID 1 configuration.

All machines I want to use the files from need to use syncthing pointed at the NAS folder. The NAS basically becomes my central repository of files.

TODO! Backup the NAS to somewhere offsite. Maybe an S3 bucket or google cloud storage or something.

Although git works great, there is some double-duty regarding history: there are both the git history of the .org files and also the.org_archive files. I wonder if people opt for one or the other and not both?

I've been using Org Mode for close to 10 years now, and I never grokked how the archiving is supposed to be used. You can browse the archive files for your data, and the automatically added metadata give some context as to where it was located, but AFAIK you can't rebuild an old version of an .org file from the archive. So because of that, if I care about the whole structural history of an org file, I stick it in a git repository.

I made a thread about this on /r/Emacs, perhaps people here might chime in too: https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/jiyn4n/orgmode_archi...

> 3. Obsess about backing up all of your org files because if you ever lose them you will literally have lost half of what you know.

all my org files are inside an org folder in Dropbox :) instant sync of my org system between computers :)

That is only a storage system. DB backup only covers the last 30 days.

Storage != Backup

True! I don't worry much about backup, I do a copy once in a while of the whole folder to a different place. But those who care can automate that easily with a script and cron. When it's just plain text files, everything becomes easier :)

"I do a copy once in a while of the whole folder to a different place."

Yeah, that is a backup.

But I totally agree, it becomes much easier when stuff is plain text files!

That's exactly what I have. And then I use Orgzly on my android phone and beorg on my ipad :)

I've got webdav export, it seems to be the sane way to sync with orgzly, what are you using ?

I used to have my files stored on iCloud while it was only my Windows Desktop and my iPad but when I threw my Android phone in the mix I switched to Dropbox.

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