Gingko or Dynalist?

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Nov 22, 2017 at 04:09 PM

I love Dynalist, but I just had a harrowing experience with it. I had one long list disappear as if deleted. I had opened the list (which was a node of a parent list) in the browser of three different devices in the course of 24 hours. The next day, when I looked for it in Safari my MacBook, it was gone. It was also gone when I looked for it on my iPad. Luckily, when I got to work on Monday morning and opened Dynalist in Chrome on my Windows PC, the list appear. I immediately exported it as an OPML file, and, sure enough, when I went up to the higher level, the list disappeared. I was able to restore it by pasting the OPML text back into Dynalist. I sent an email to the Dynalist support people and have not gotten any kind of response.

The result? My confidence in Dynalist is shaken, and my respect for the developers has diminished. I may continue to use Dynalist, but I’ll make frequent backups with OPML exports.

As for your project, if you’re going to be writing a lot of material, I’d choose Gingko over Dynalist anyway. Dynalist isn’t well made for crafting lots of body text, in my view. This also sounds like a great project for Scrivener, if you don’t need access to it through the cloud.

Steve Z.