Iotas and Nextcloud Notes sync

30 April, 2026 - Categories: notetaking, blogging - Tags: Iotas, Nextcloud, front matter, Zola, Hugo

By Steven Rosenberg

One of the key features of the Iotas notetaking app is the ability to sync with Nextcloud Notes.

I started a free-for-now Nextcloud account at https://thegood.cloud to test this. Free is a pretty good price for a 2 GB hosted Nextcloud account, and if I decide to stick with TheGood.Cloud after my 180-day trial, the service costs €23.88 per year for 10 GB. That's $28.11 USD. Not bad for a whole year. Unless I decide to start hosting some heavy duty files, I'll never get close to 10 GB. I can't even see getting to 1 GB.

Once I got the Nextcloud account established, I went to Iotas and set up Nextcloud Sync. I was already logged in to TheGood.Cloud's web interface, and the sync immediately worked. I had the same notes in Iotas and Nextcloud.

For most regular notes, including to-do lists, Nextcloud Notes is great. Writing and editing notes can be done in the Web interface as well as the Nextcloud and separate Nextcloud Notes Android apps. It all works.

The Nextcloud Notes Android app works a bit better for its own subset of Nextcloud than the overall Netxcloud app. I have both on the phone.

And with all my notes in Iotas, I can export the individual Markdown-formatted notes to my Zola blog's content directory on my laptop and then build and deploy the site. It would be the same for Hugo with different front matter.

After spending a few weeks looking at notetaking apps, I wasn't sure I needed syncing, but so far I'm doing quite a bit of writing on my phone. To that end, I found my old Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Both had severe battery corrosion, and the bin they went. It didn't matter. I'm using the phone and ... my fingers.

When it comes to things like to-do lists, it's very convenient to be able to access them on and sync them to mobile. Of course you can do this with Google Keep or other paid apps like Obsidian and Standard Notes, but there's a nice degree of flexibility with Nextcloud. You can use a hosted Nextcloud account, like I'm doing, or stand up your own Nextcloud server.

The more I test the sync between Nextcloud's web view, mobile apps and my local notetaking apps, the more impressed I am with how well it works.

In addition to blog posts and to-do lists, I'm also using the Notes app to save URLs I find when I'm on the phone. I just share a web page into Notes, and I can write about it later. I wish there was a way to do this with Nextcloud on the desktop.

The main problem I'm having with Iotas and Nextcloud Notes is about the rendering of Zola blog front matter. I'm using tabs (which generally manifest themselves in my editors as spaces) to preserve the TOML formatting, and Nextcloud Notes tends to strip out the spaces and some of the linefeeds. I haven't quite figured out this issue just yet, but I'm thinking about it.