My recent post on Markdown Versus Org Mode engendered some limited but spirited engagement so I thought it would be nice to followup by writing about a post I’ve had sitting in a browser tab for sometime. Piotr Migdał writes that If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown. The title may seem aggressively pro Markdown but the point of Migdal’s post is to embrace plain text as your data storage medium. He just happens to use Markdown but mentions Org mode as another equally good choice.
His point is that as long as there are computers and UTF-8, your data will be safe if you store it as plain text. That’s important because, as he says, “If you publish something online, sooner or later, it will vanish.” The only way to be safe is to save your data in some sort of plain text. This is consistent with my opt-stated rule not to entrust the only copy of your data to a third party.
A lot of Migdal’s post is how he goes about this. My case is simple. I write virtually everything in Org mode that gets saved in one Org file or another or, perhaps, in my email archive. The only exception is my texts which I generally write using emacs-everywhere but don’t bother saving. It wouldn’t be hard to put a wrapper around emacs-everywhere to save my side of the conversation but I’d still be missing the other side. In any event, most of my texts aren’t worth saving.
Migdal makes a good point and his post is worth reading.