I use notepad++ in the same way without guilt, I also have a paper notebook where I write things in the same random chaos. In the past I had at a time a LG monitor that had really large bezels and I used to glue post its to it all the time as my "temporary" notes.

Most of note taking applications I tried attempt to convince all my text is important and must be stored and if possible classified and that's just not how my relationship with physical notes is.

I resonate a lot with this. Like most of what goes into that system really is pretty disposable, but it would be nice if a note-taking app could just quietly swallow anything I didn't look at for a few days, while still making it available as an "also, this?" entry in full text search. Or maybe for a kind of context-aware search/browsing, if it were possible to do a query like "show me everything I added or altered around the same time I was working with keywords x and y".

I used to use a clipboard manager. It had two functionalities:

- The ability to scroll or search my clipboard history

- The ability to pin/favorite individual entries, which would then show up in the pinned/favorited tab

That thing was practically my extra brain before the database corrupted itself... (that threw me so off that I don't even remember anymore most of the time from back when I had it.)

It's saved, just not to separate files.

And the solution to getting it synced is to back up your computer, which you should definitely be doing.

Fair, and I have a whole-system backup (Backblaze), but if the unsaved Notepad++ files were lost, I don't even know what it is I'd have to download from BB to recover them. Obviously I can Google that and figure it out, but who knows... maybe the BB agent will consider them a cache and exclude them? The point is that I haven't really taken the time to consider much of this because step 1 would be to literally just hit the save button, and I haven't even done that.

More broadly, though, I don't know that I consider whole-system backups as important as I might have once. All my local important docs are in Dropbox, and all the code I'm working on is regularly synced out to git hosts. Other than some unimportant Fusion/Bambu projects, most of what I'd lose is honestly that same kind of ephemeral context that unsaved Notepad++ files are: terminal history, browser bar completions, my downloads folder, etc.

I'll just say that if it was somehow not backing up AppData/Roaming that would be a big deal and you would want to figure that out and fix it ASAP.

Same. Although I just discovered UpNote, which seems good so far.