I suddenly created the 6-step chain replication for personal notes

Recently I realized that my personal notes are being replicated far more times than I originally intended. Here’s a concise overview.

Background

For years, I captured quick thoughts in Apple Notes, but as the collection grew into a personal knowledge base, I needed better structure. I moved to Obsidian, which is powerful, yet too heavy for fast note capturing. Looking for a lighter, cross-platform solution with an open API, I adopted Memos as my primary note-taking tool.

Why Memos?

• Open-source & actively maintained – large community and extensively tested code.
• Extensible – rich REST API enables custom integrations.

Replication Chain I Suddenly Implemented Over Time

1. I send a note to a Telegram bot built with the Memos Telegram integration.
2. The bot saves the note to my self-hosted Memos instance on a rented VPS.
3. On desktop, the Obsidian Memos Sync plugin pulls the note into Obsidian, grouping entries in daily Markdown files with timestamps.
4. Obsidian Git pushes the notes to a private GitHub repository.
5. The same Obsidian vault lives in an iCloud-synced folder, which copies the files to my Mac and syncs them to the iOS Obsidian app on my iPhone.
6. iCloud’s automatic backups create an additional copy in Apple’s backup storage.

Summary of Places Where Each Note Ends Up

• Telegram servers
  
• Self-hosted VPS (plus its own backups)
  
• Local Mac disk
  
• GitHub servers
  
• iCloud primary storage
  
• iCloud backup storage
  
• Local iPhone storage

Although iCloud and its backup share the same provider, they reside in separate storage systems. In total, every note is stored in seven distinct locations.