What do you with old notes?

Maybe this isn’t specific to SilverBullet, but I’m hoping to hear what others do.

What do you do with notes that you consider old or otherwise no longer have a use for?

Do you delete them, tag them with something like #archive, move them to a different folder, or move them entirely out of silverbullet (and to what/where)?

The reason I ask is because I have a ton of old notes that are mostly receipts/confirmation numbers/etc that I’ve saved over the years. I’m a bit of a digital hoarder, so just deleting them feels wrong, but they can definitely get in the way when I’m searching for something specific and they pollute the results. On the other hand, I also have a lot of old notes that aren’t useful to me right now but maybe could be useful in the future.

I’m new to SB, so I’m not in this predicament yet, but I always keep, but archive information of no immediate use. So, I would probably tag it #archive, and then when I run a query, have it exclude items with that tag. This way, if I DO need something that I archived, I remove the exclusion and get everything.

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I too tend to keep a lot of old notes, but I don’t want them to get out of sight. In your case, I think #archive plus object decoration to hide them would be a great combo. That said, I don’t keep receipts or such within my notes, they are maintained in different folder in different app.

As I said, I personally don’t delete much in my notes, I just get better at searching. The only ones I “hide” are my completed tasks. I do this by moving the completed todo items into a separate directory, but keep the folder structure. This works as I have a defined folder structure for todos with Backlog/<area> files for each “area”.

PS: Whenever I want to delete something or generally think I have an “inefficient note taking system”, I just console myself by saying, “all the state is in git and I can just write a bash script to get whatever I want if I really need it” and move on. So far, I never needed to do anything and life has been good. I’m glad my brain is gullible. :joy:

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Honestly. I just keep them around.

Forever.

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Have you done any sort of tests to see how much SB can handle, in terms of pages, images, etc, before it starts feeling unusable due to the amount it takes to sync,index,reload, etc?

That is my only concern.

So far, SB has been extremely fast but not I am approaching to ~1K pages and I am worried that it will start affecting performance.

If that’s the case, maybe I would be interested in a way of “archiving” pages that are not queried, indexed, all the time

EDIT: I guess it could work with spaceIgnore?
I imagine a space-script that when someone calls through a slashcommand, or command, moves the page (and hopefully embedded images too, for example) to Archive folder.
Then in SETTINGS we could have Archive folder setup in spaceIgnore

Maybe someone could create such space-script? :slight_smile: :pray:

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I have not done this myself, but here’s a related issue: Performance and other issues with a large garden (>7k notes) · Issue #1010 · silverbulletmd/silverbullet · GitHub

This also links to a public “garden” (space) to test with: GitHub - flancian/garden: Flancian's digital garden

Thanks for the responses. I’ll definitely have to take a look at page/object decorators. I didn’t think about it before because I didn’t want to physically add a tag to every note, but having a tag auto-applied to everything within a directory shouldn’t be too bad.

My “bulk” notes mostly come from receipts/confirmations like I said. I already use paperless-ngx for scanned-in receipts, so maybe I should just move these to paperless as well. And then maybe we could have a silverbullet-paperless plug that acts as an interface to paperless :wink:

I have another set of bulk notes that I’ve moved out of my normal space directory for now. They’re mostly notes that have been migrated from one app to another and include things like more receipts/pdfs/web clippings. I’m too lazy to sort through and organize them, but I’ll give page decorations a shot in an effort to shove the mess in the closet for now.

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