I've been looking for a better way to store private notes and really most of the time, just note designs, architectures and computer programming progress in markdown files.

When I was travelling in Puerto Escodido in November 2023, I used this method and have returned to it. I'm using GoCryptFS, which takes a little fiddling to install but once it is. You can simply run these commands and I'm able to have a folder encrypted and backed up across iCloud and TimeMachine.

gocryptfs -init ./data for a new folder to be setup as an encrypted data store.

Then to mount it to another folder I simply run gocryptfs data notes where notes is a folder in the same directory. Then to unmount it umount notes.

Perhaps one day we can to use the private System Keychain and our finger print. It be accessed via the Secure Enclave via TouchID, such that you wouldn't require a password and always be able to de-crypt your notes/data. I've parked this for now in the ever growing list of designs and concepts for the future apple eco-system.