Athlon1600
Retention period of notes on notepad.mx website
Hello, firstly, thank you for creating a such a minimal yet robust online note-taking website. I just wanted to know how long is the retention period of notes that were created on the notepad.mx website? Will the notes get self-destructed if the user doesn't log in for say 1–2 years?
Will the notes get self-destructed if the user doesn't log in for say 1–2 years?
no such thing at the moment. Notes will stay on the server forever. I'm thinking the only reason to do that is to avoid running out of disk space, but I don't know how realistic is for that to happen. The site has almost 5,000 notes by now, and they only take up 21 megabytes of space. At this rate, my $5/month server could easily store multiple millions of notes no problem...
Someone finding their stash of notes 3 years after they forgot about them - that's totally worth it for me.
However, it would be very simple to implement such a feature using cron jobs where you would periodically scan storage directory for files (notes) that haven't been updated in a year (using find command probably), and then delete such files using rm.
might be worth documenting this potential feature and provide exact scripts... will close this ticket once that's done 👍
1 year is too short, I guess. If you were to delete inactive notes, then kindly consider deleting notes which are inactive for 5 years. I guess that would be the sweet spot.
Even as of now, notepad.mx contains over 10,000 notes, and it all fits at under 50 megabytes:
I should also mention that by default the app caps individual notes to be no more than 10 kilobytes: https://github.com/Athlon1600/notepad/blob/master/backend/src/Server.ts#L37
so yeah, this can fit A LOT of notes, and given that these days you can get a whole gigabyte for less than penny, there is like no reason to ever delete any notes ever.
So we store them forever :+1: