Sync without silent overwrites: how Plainva handles conflicts
The one sync bug I will not tolerate in my own notes app is a silent overwrite. I’ve had it happen in other tools: you write something on one device, sync runs quietly in the background, and whichever version synced last just wins — no matter how much you’d written since. For notes, that’s not a trade-off I’ll accept, and it’s a real reason people don’t trust sync. So Plainva’s sync is built around one rule: you never lose an edit without being told.
Nothing gets lost while you’re offline
Every change is written locally first and queued, so going offline — or losing the connection mid-sync — never loses work; the queue just catches up once you’re back. When Plainva syncs a note that changed on two devices, it doesn’t compare “yours vs. theirs” and crown a winner — it compares both against the common ancestor, the last version both sides agreed on, the same way real version control does. If your edits and the other device’s touch different parts of the note, they merge automatically and you never even notice.
When two edits truly collide
Sometimes two changes land on the exact same line, and there’s no honest way to merge them automatically. That’s the one case where Plainva stops instead of guessing: it keeps your version, saves the other as a .CONFLICT copy, and opens a side-by-side resolver so you decide, line by line, what the note should actually say.
To be clear, this is about your own notes moving between your own devices — a laptop and a desktop, say — not real-time collaboration with other people typing at once. All of it happens directly between Plainva and whatever storage you picked — WebDAV/Nextcloud, S3, OneDrive, wherever your files live — with no Plainva server in the middle and your credentials sitting in the OS keychain, not on some login screen.
- Try it: plainva.com
- More on sync and conflicts: the sync guide
— Marco