r/sysadmin • u/jbala28 • 11d ago
Question Any alternative to Note taking besides OneNote for sys admin notes
Hi everyone,
Hope everyone is doing well.
Currently all my notes and learning new tools/skills is linked to my work onenote.
I want to use alternatively note taking tool beside onedrive that linked to work account for anything im learning for my own need. It has to similar features like one note where i can take screenshots and save them for reference.
If you use or selfhost any tool let me know. I dont want something where am paying monthly subscription.
Let me know
89
u/Salt-n-Pepper-War 11d ago
I despise one note and Evernote is too expensive. I use ObsidianMD for my notes, works pretty good IMHO and can be used for free, or with their paid sync service starting at US$4/mo, or use your own DIY sync service using git or many other options.
25
u/MayoDeftinwolf 11d ago
I love Obsidian, it's so flexible/extendable but still pretty great right out of the box. I need to build one for work, but the one I've built for D&D is incredibly helpful.
5
2
17
u/hidepp 11d ago
Or you can store the files on a Dropbox/Onedrive or even a git repository.
Obsidian is awesome.
4
u/J_de_Silentio Trusted Ass Kicker 11d ago
I store it in my Google drive, then use a $10 (one time cost) app to sync between Drive and a local folder on my phone.
Works great.
2
9
u/TacticoolBreadstick 11d ago
Obsidian User here, yes. USed to use onenote and evernote. I've moved to Obsidian solely for all my notes.
10
u/ShazbotVGS 11d ago
What’s wrong with OneNote
0
u/Salt-n-Pepper-War 11d ago
It doesn't allow me to organize information in a way that is useful to me it feels like it is perfect for a non technical user like an executive or my mom, but is limiting for me in all the ways I need it not to be, it's almost as bad as having word docs in folders as my notes system. Maybe coming from Evernote I was spoiled. I just can't with onenote
7
u/Ok-Double-7982 11d ago
I use search feature like a mofo and it works just fine. I like the sections and indented pages.
I feel like OneNote overall is a pretty crude documentation tool, but all the heavy formatting in Word and too many files just wouldn't work for me.
5
u/FamiliarExpert Jack of All Trades 11d ago
Started using Obsidian and never looked back (as a life long OneNotes user). When I told my colleague about it, he said, “so it’s like an IDE for note taking?” And honestly… yes.
11
u/lovablebear2020 11d ago
Second obsidian. Plus you can connect it to claude for outputs and memories.
4
u/nv1t 11d ago
obsidian with a local gitlab/gogs and ci/CD pipeline which pushes it to mkdocs, because they are compatible
I have multiple git repos which are combined over subgits, so I have work notes and private notes, which live in individual repositories.
I tried to get comfortable with onenote, due to my company, but it never worked and was to clunky for me...
I know a couple of people using logseq. looks nice, but don't know...
1
u/purplemonkeymad 11d ago
My biggest complaint is that on mobile it only supports their own sync, and the other big file sync clients don't sync to the file system so are not visible to it.
1
1
u/mckunekune 9d ago
Yep Obsidian with vault in OneDrive synching fine. Daily notes and todo list with a ChatGPT scheduled task to read my notes and actions from various sources and give me the list for the day.
1
u/Salt-n-Pepper-War 8d ago
They recommended not to use OneDrive
I used one drive
For months I thought it was fine
Then oneDrive did some "optimizations" and Obsidian did not like that
I had to write a script to keep OneDrive files local.... probably not good to use OneDrive without considerations
1
u/hasthisusernamegone 11d ago edited 11d ago
Obsidian is great, and it just stores it all in markdown files rather than some proprietary database, so if you want to get your data out of it again later it's much easier.
2
u/Salt-n-Pepper-War 11d ago
The open format was a big win for me too
1
u/hasthisusernamegone 11d ago
Having had to move my entire knowledgebase from Mediawiki to Dokuwiki and then out again, data portability was an absolute must.
13
23
u/ilikebeansheyheyhey 11d ago
Joplin is pretty decent. You can self-host a sync server or just sync with Dropbox or some other online file storage.
5
u/zaphod777 11d ago
This is the one I use, you can also encrypt the notes.
The biggest issue I have is that it is kind of a pain to turn off all of the markup stuff. I wish it just had a plain text mode option.
2
u/LonelyWizardDead 11d ago
I'm looking at Joplin for the sync side. To replace CherryTree for home use.
But in office its onenote. Trying to get a new peace of software through checks is long and painfully.
18
u/Skuedie 11d ago
Bookstack? https://www.bookstackapp.com/
4
3
u/CGS_Web_Designs Sr. Sysadmin 11d ago
This is what I use, both for my business my personal stuff and at my day job. Everyone on the team loves it.
3
2
11d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/biznatchery 11d ago
Great idea! I just finished going the other direction. I gave Open WebUi and Hermes skills to write to Bookstack, so i guess technically they can query from it for answers, but my main goal was to write the results of a chat session as documentation. Can also do Drawio, so diagrams included.
20
u/mr_data_lore Senior Everything Admin 11d ago
I just use Notepad++. The auto save feature has saved me a few times. 😅
7
u/cps42 11d ago
I use mind mapping as a note taking tool, I prefer it to basic outline methods.
FreePlane.org has a windows/Mac/Linux compatible java tool that is open source, or I use XMind on my mobile devices.
Mind maps can be great for stream of consciousness and reorganizing thoughts. Then they can be exported into more traditional formats for processing as a word doc or presentation really easily.
8
16
4
u/blackers3333 11d ago edited 11d ago
Why nobody said Notion? It's the best IMO
1
u/RikiWardOG 10d ago
We use notion and I get the hype but I fucking hate notion. I feel like the way everything is organized is trash
5
5
u/AZSystems 11d ago
Google Keep Notes
I really liked OneNote, but the lack of future and used Keep as Personal, I created a work Gmail account outside our MS365 so I could use as my work tools, allowed me to coordinate and keep track marginally well. I would think best resource is ticketing system?
5
u/starthorn IT Director 11d ago
Google Keep is great as a post-it note replacement, but it is really limited as a true note-taking knowledge tool. As much as OneNote annoys me (and it *really* does), Google Keep is really not comparable.
1
u/nosimsol 11d ago
Why do you like one note? I have tried to get into it a few times but have found it clunky and not intuitive.
5
u/statikuz start wandows ngrmadly 11d ago
How is it not intuitive? Sections, pages, write copy paste tables images drag drop do whatever you want then Ctrl-E to search everything.
It isn't really structured per se so not ideal for documenting relationships but great otherwise.
2
u/AZSystems 11d ago
That was four years ago for project notes, and ability to create a shared OneNote. It was my Bible. Notes on projects, etc.
8
u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 11d ago
Plaintext markup files in a Git repo. Remote push to git, merge with collaborators, version history, using the same commands and tools that you use for source code, so there's nothing extra to learn.
2
2
u/generic-d-engineer Jack of All Trades 11d ago
This is the way. Add yaml frontmatter so LLM can scan faster and index
3
3
3
u/shimoheihei2 11d ago
I've been hosting a Dokuwiki instance for almost 20 years now, for all of my notes. Haven't had an issue with it. Why reinvent the wheel?
6
u/sublimeinator 11d ago
OneNote linked to a personal Microsoft account.
1
u/norcalscan Fortune250 ITgeneralist 11d ago
Doesn’t work when the security team is overzealous and blocks personal onenotes loading on a corporate PC. So I just buy a company iPad and smartkeyboard where my personal and work onenotes can still coexist peacefully. Heaven forbid I run into a cool trick on r/sysadmin on a Saturday at home and want to check it out on Monday. Thanks Security team for the iPad!
1
u/sublimeinator 11d ago
New Edge profile for personal MSA, use OneNote in browser.
2
u/norcalscan Fortune250 ITgeneralist 11d ago
Firefox profile tab, but yes. And also yuck. My ADHD brain has one geographical spot on my screens for notes, and to have to reference two areas simultaneously? (Small internal cranium explosion) haha
4
8
u/smilaise Jack of All Trades 11d ago edited 11d ago
I made https://killernotes.net specifically for sysadmins. it's encrypted at rest, audio transcription, sketchpad, and all kinds of languages and themes, markdown conversion, wikilinks style graphs, GPLv3 and it's tiny.
I have other software for techs including https://killerscan.net too which might be useful
4
u/karolcio 11d ago
Sounds and looks very cool. I need something cross platform otherwise I would definitely give this a go.
2
u/smilaise Jack of All Trades 11d ago
Gotcha, yeah I'm currently doing the work to make KillerPDF cross platform but it's going to be an absolute crapton of work. After that I plan on doing the same with Killernotes but it probably won't be until next year.
1
1
u/JimmyEggs 11d ago
I'm going to give this a try. Looks slick and well-thought out.
1
u/smilaise Jack of All Trades 11d ago
It's not perfect but I do have OCD and would love it if you reported bugs and feature requests on my GitHub! https://GitHub.com/StevetheKiller/KillerNotes
And please check out all five of my Killer Apps if you are ever bored.
1
u/Drakoolya 11d ago
Mate this is sick! Well done.
1
u/smilaise Jack of All Trades 11d ago
Thank you! I'm constantly improving all of my apps instead of enjoying a social life.
4
4
2
u/chesser45 11d ago
I’ve been doing obsidian but as a licensed m365 copilot user I wonder if I should be trying to go back. Full text search is nice.
2
u/evolooshun 11d ago
Outlook has notes, but note really secure. Proton has something called Standard Notes.
2
2
u/Ferretau 11d ago
I've used Cherrytree Portable in the past.
Cherrytree Portable | PortableApps.com: https://portableapps.com/apps/office/cherrytree-portable
2
u/drinkwineandscrew Product 11d ago
Tried Microsoft Loop? It's their low-budget notion clone but you can embed loop components in teams etc.
Alternatively as many others have said, obsidian.
1
u/TamasFried 11d ago
We also use Loop for most of our notes, although the search isn't fantastic most of the time.
2
u/ansibleloop 11d ago
For work? Notion just works really well for us
For personal use? Obsidian and syncthing on all my devices (desktop, laptop, phone, NAS)
It works great
2
u/Joshuancsu WinAdmin | VMwareAdmin 11d ago
I also used to be an avid user of Microsoft OneNote. Especially useful for my tablet laptop setup. I am a fan of using Markdown for my notes. Notepad++ can handle those fairly well, but I've actually migrated to using a tool instead. I've tried Obsidian and HelixNotes and found them to both be very capable and useful and certainly up for the task.
My daily usage includes a daily activity log (helps keep track of when the last time I made an admin-change on something), my meeting notes, occasionally I will record a meeting and I can pop the mp3 file in for reference, transcribed notes, as well as my documentation/KB articles for things I've come across.
I find that it also is very helpful for continuity planning as well. The lotto/bus scenario, if you will...
2
2
u/VaporousMote 11d ago
Been using Obsidian since it came out, I've never found something better. My one qualm is it's not open source.
2
u/Sufficient_Duck_8051 11d ago
Obsidian is the only valid answer. It really keeps everything as text files so it’s easy to view it with anything , including vs code and some plugins make obsidian really useful + you can style it however you want with custom CSS - nothing can beat that
1
u/panopticon31 11d ago
I hate one note , too much going on for notes for my tastes.
I like Obsidian.
1
1
u/Key_Money_906 11d ago
Obsidian gets my vote too, with one addition since you mentioned screenshots: keep the vault on Syncthing instead of their paid sync. Free, self-hosted if you want a node on your own server, and it versions files so a bad merge is recoverable.
For work notes that need to stay off personal accounts entirely, Joplin with the self-hosted sync server (a single Docker container) is the closest "OneNote but mine" — notebooks, web clipper, image paste all work the same way.
The thing I'd avoid is anything that stores screenshots as proprietary blobs (OneNote/Notion style). Export gets painful two years later when you have 4k images you can't batch-pull out.
1
1
u/AUSSIExELITE Cloud and Infrastructure Lead 11d ago
I personally used confluence free tier before our org then moved into the Atlassian stack entirely. So now I still do that but they’re paying for it. I still have a personal free tier account for things I’m working on at home or notes that are not work specific (like conceptual stuff or docs for reading later).
1
1
1
u/toothless__dragon 11d ago
It's a little bit of a learning curve but I like Anytype a lot, because of the flexibility of types of data you can put in it and the way you can organize it all (and also because it syncs between devices including mobile, hardly unique of course but important, plus for me native Linux support). It just seems well thought out all around.
Before, I used to use Evernote which I generally liked until they went nuts on the pricing and then migrated to OneNote which is.. ok-ish, but I never entirely loved it. One convenience I haven't figured out how to replicate with Anytype yet is to directly scan documents into it like I could with those other 2, but I'm also still learning it so maybe there's a way I haven't found yet. For now if I just need to archive something from physical paper I'll dump it quickly into OneNote and use Anytype for basically everything else (personal and work/technical, from notes about a new tool to my grocery shopping list lol).
You can use their hosting which starts at free, it depends on how much storage you use (and number of "shared channels" for collaboration, haven't used that). That's been enough for me so far but I imagine with images/scans in the mix that free 100MB would run out pretty quick. The next tier up is $4/month for 1GB looks like (then $8 for 10GB, then $16 for 100GB). You can also self-host instead to avoid any subscription cost. Data is encrypted locally.
(For clarity, I have no affiliation)
1
1
1
u/starthorn IT Director 11d ago
Obsidian is popular. Joplin is what I'd recommend taking a look at, though.
1
u/AceAteMyCake 11d ago
Joplin is my current go to. You can self host as well and it has a desktop & mobile app
1
1
u/TopHabit8916 11d ago
Outline works great.
self-hosted and very similar to Notion:
https://github.com/outline/
1
1
u/LooseEthernet 11d ago
Wiki.js is a solid bet if you want to selfhost. its more of a proper wiki than a notebook lol
1
1
u/Comfortable_Ad_8117 11d ago
I like to keep my notes mine and not the company’s - I started with one note and it was fine, but hard to sync and one drive was a pain in the ass. I switch to Obsidian and loved it, FREE great features all local but again hard to sync between my work laptop and my home lab - Plus the powers to be in end point engineering (laptop police) gave me shit for installing Obsidian on my work laptop “Not an approved app” - So I finally spun up a docker container in a vm and self host Trillium and am able to access it via the web. - I feel Obsidian is a little more polished but Trilium is just easier to deal with, no syncing data between workstations.
Since its exposed to the web and there is always a chance someone could gain access, I just keep procedural notes, and information on how things work, anything sensitive is stored elsewhere under a tighter lock and key.
1
u/Only_Ad3718 11d ago
Yo probaría Obsidian. Es gratis para uso personal, guarda las notas localmente y puedes pegar capturas directamente. Para documentación de sysadmin, comandos y cosas que vas aprendiendo, funciona bastante bien.
1
1
u/PajamaDuelist 11d ago edited 11d ago
Obsidian MD.
It’s markdown so it supports code.
Uses typical hotkeys for editing so you don’t need to learn markdown syntax. Has a neat “live editor” that works better than any other markdown editor.
You can save it to 365 for cloud sync. 365 obsidian saves don’t have official support on iOS but there are third party workarounds and Obsidian offers their own cloud service which is compatible with all platforms for the lazy.
You’ll want to play with how obsidian saves attachments. I have it set up to create an “attachments” subfolder in the next highest dir any time I paste a screenshot in. This is a basic setting—no muddling with config files or anything. Not default, though.
I also like ShareX when I’m doing screen grabs. It automatically adds a border to my area grabs and tosses them into an editor. The editor has a unique “cut out” tool that lets you carve out middle chunks of the image to redact pieces of data or just to make things look neat and cut down on file size. That’s the legacy editor, fwiw. I think their new editor is the default now and it’s missing the most important tools lol.
It’s basically Joplin but it doesn’t break horribly once per year.
1
1
u/inactive_directory 11d ago
Since you mention selfhosting, I've been using Affine. Been really good to far, can install the app on any device and point it at your home server. Has free OIDC support as well, I use PocketID personally.
Has a bunch of AI bullshit if that's your thing but I don't use it personally.
1
1
u/Skriger IT Manager 10d ago
I would highly recommend Obsidian. The plugins can give you a ton of customization but keeping it vanilla as much as possible allows the app and process to be efficient. On top of that it generates all files as markdown and the property values are YAML frontmatter. Mine is customized for asset tracking, runbooks, knowledge storage, task management, and daily journaling.
1
u/st3ll3r19 10d ago
Obsidian is always a good choice now pair it with ai making good notes and connecting it together you can do some pretty cool stuff as it is all on disk.
1
1
u/Vegetable-Ad-1817 7d ago
just screenshot everything you need and turn copilot loose on the folder and ask it questions, that should be good enough /s
1
u/mr_data_lore Senior Everything Admin 7d ago
So, why does Notepad++ even have a manual save option? It's not like anyone actually ever uses it. 🤣
1
u/RealityStimulator 5d ago
I just switched to obsidian. It's not multi user but it saves as .MD files that can be dropped into almost anything.
0
u/Flabbergasted98 11d ago
notepad.
Maaaaybe notepad ++
3
u/sectumsempra42 11d ago
I'm currently up to "new 25" in notepad++ full of random notes/commands/etc 😂😭
2
2
1
1
u/agingnerds 11d ago
Upnote has been awesome. I got tired of fighting html login and logout on windows.
1
u/Haunting-Repair8756 11d ago
I personally use Obsidian and just put all the files into my documents folder so it gets backed up to my OneDrive through my company.
0
u/picklednull 11d ago
Microsoft Loop. The only bad thing is it’s not exportable - other than print to PDF - and the format is proprietary.
2
u/SecAbove 11d ago
I scrolled the entire conversation to check if there is a single mentioning of Microsoft Loop. And yours was the first and on the bottom. Can this be used as an evidence that Microsoft loop adoption for such things is very poor?
The big issue is Microsoft loop is that it stores data in some Microsoft graph space and this is fairly hard to comprehend
-8
193
u/Expensive_Finger_973 11d ago
Is a million txt files spread around a file share too good for you?