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Edit your vault in Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox

July 22, 2026

Not everyone self-hosts. Plenty of the people I talk to already keep their files in Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox, and they just want to edit their Markdown notes there — without handing them to yet another app in the middle. Plainva connects to all three, and the sync runs strictly between your machine and your provider; there’s no Plainva server in the path, because there isn’t a Plainva server at all.

OneDrive and Dropbox: just connect

For these two there’s genuinely nothing to register in advance. Pick the provider, connect, sign in in your browser, then choose which folder in the cloud holds your notes and a local folder to keep in sync — Plainva ships its own app registration for both, so you never touch a client ID or an API console. (If your workplace locks that down, you can still supply your own app ID, but almost nobody needs to.)

Google Drive is the one honest exception

Until Plainva passes Google’s CASA security review, Google Drive still asks a little of you: you create your own free Google Cloud project once and paste in the credentials, about five minutes, and the in-app guide walks you through every click. I’d rather say that plainly than pretend the step isn’t there. A smoother default is on my list.

Whichever you pick, you get the same thing underneath: a local copy of your vault that works fully offline and syncs back once you’re online, the same conflict-safe handling everywhere — offline queue, 3-way merge, a visual resolver, never a silent overwrite — and your credentials sitting in the OS keychain, not a config file. And because Plainva only ever reads and writes plain Markdown, switching clouds later is just pointing it at a different folder. Your notes never change shape. That’s the whole idea: your files, your storage, your call.

— Marco