Sync and file access

Kinetic Notes has no built-in sync service, and does not talk to any server. What it has instead is a choice about how your notes are stored — and one of those choices makes them ordinary files that anything else can read, including whatever already syncs folders between your machines.

Choosing how notes are stored

In the application’s notes preferences you can store your notes as:

• A single database. Everything in one file, compressed, and optionally encrypted.
• Individual plain text files. One file per note.
• Individual RTF files. One file per note, keeping rich text.
• Individual HTML files.
• Individual Word files — either .doc or Word XML.

For the individual-file formats you can also control which file extensions are used and which are read back in, so notes can be .txt, .md, or whatever your other tools expect.

Switching formats converts your existing notes. It is not a one-way door, but it is a real operation on your data, so it is worth having a backup before you change it.

Syncing with a folder service

Point Kinetic Notes at a folder inside iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing, or anything else that keeps a directory in step across machines, and use one of the individual-file formats. Your notes are then just files in that folder, and the sync service does what it already does well.

This is also what makes Kinetic Notes sit comfortably beside other tools. A folder of plain text files can be read by Obsidian, iA Writer, BBEdit, grep, or a script you wrote yourself. Nothing is locked in a format only this application understands.

If you want encryption instead

Use the single database format and turn encryption on. Your notes are then protected at rest, but they are inside one encrypted file that only Kinetic Notes can read — no other editor, and no useful per-note syncing.

That is the trade in full: external access, or encryption. Both are legitimate choices and the application supports either, but it cannot give you both at once, and neither can anything else that stores plain files on disk.

See Encryption for exactly what is protected.