Comment by JonChesterfield
2 months ago
I think trillium is stashing the notes in a database. Certainly it thinks there is a migration step needed to move files around.
The everything markdown feature of obsidian is the dominant one. I can edit the files in emacs when I want to and the sync sorts it out just fine. They're stashed in a fossil repo by one of the machines as a backup because I'm paranoid and that also works fine because it's all ascii files.
Trilium works alongside a SQLite DB. It backs-up your db.sqlite on a regular basis, lets you create manual backups, version-controls each and every note with checkpoints, supports full-encryption, and as soon as you set-up sync between clients/servers, you practically end-up with master-master replicas of your entire notes collection (I have my notes replicated at all time on 3 devices or more). All of this are native, supported features and transparent for the end-user (no offloading to a VCS, no scripting, etc).
Trilium also lets you import/export your whole database as folders of markdown files if you are really into that, I just don't see the point: this is free open-source software, there is no vendor lock-in and no reason to dumb-down the storage layer to text files. But to each their own :-)
There is the option to export the whole thing to HTML, Markdown and OPML (v1 or v2). Plus there is an included script in the trilium folder that dumps the contents of the database, so you can do it even if the trilium software itself doesn't work for some reason.