What is AllMyNotes Organizer? ‹ How AllMyNotes stores your data - and why it’s safer than you might expect

If you’ve ever wondered exactly how your notes are stored, or whether your data is truly private - here’s the full picture.

What makes it different

• Starts instantly - no matter how many notes you have. When AllMyNotes opens, it loads only a tiny tree structure (a few kilobytes). Your actual notes load on demand, only when you open them - and unload the moment you switch away. Whether you have 10 notes or 10,000, startup time stays the same. Memory usage stays minimal the whole time.

• Self-repairing database - survives up to 90% data corruption. This one surprises people. Your text is stored in multiple locations within the file simultaneously. If a drive failure, virus, or partial corruption damages the database, AllMyNotes can automatically recover your data - even if 90% of the file is gone. Minor corruption? You won’t even notice: the engine silently restores from the duplicate copy and carries on. We stress-tested this thoroughly, because your notes are not something we take lightly.

• Always encrypted - even without a password. Here’s where we’re different from most apps. Your data is protected with 1800-bit encryption on disk at all times - not just when you set a master password. No readable traces of your notes are ever left on the disk. Store your .ddb file on a USB drive, back it up to a network share, email it to yourself - nobody can read it without the app and your key. Not even us.

• No size limits. Store as much as you want - the .ddb format supports files up to 16 Exabytes (that’s the NTFS ceiling, and you won’t get there). One practical note: large image attachments load into RAM when you open a note, so use reasonable image sizes on older machines.

• Search across everything without loading anything first. AllMyNotes uses a built-in search hash - when you search, it doesn’t pre-load your notes. Disk access stays minimal, and results come back fast regardless of database size.

Things worth knowing

• Virtual file system inside one file. The .ddb file contains its own mini file system - deleted and rewritten fragments are automatically reused. Every time you exit the app, it quietly defragments itself in the background for a few seconds. Your file stays lean and fast without any effort on your part.

• Automatic timestamped backups, every session. Every time you exit AllMyNotes, it saves a new backup with a date-stamped filename. Backups older than 7 days are cleaned up automatically (configurable). You always have a rolling history of recent saves - no manual effort needed.

• Your file goes where you go. Moving your data is as simple as copying one file. Save it to an external drive, a NAS, a USB stick, or any folder your backup software watches. No import/export wizard needed - it’s just a file. Use Save As from the menu, or copy it in Explorer.

• Zero dependencies, zero bloat. Our database engine is built entirely in-house. No .NET, no SQLite, no ADO - no runtime to install first. It just works, on any Windows PC, right out of the box.

• Full Unicode support. Mix languages freely - English, Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, whatever you need. Text is stored natively in Unicode at the API level.

• Your password is never stored. When you set a master password, we store only a cryptographic hash - not the password itself. Even we can’t recover it if you forget it. That’s intentional: it means no server, no recovery email, and nobody who could ever hand your key to someone else.

• 6 months of engineering, zero shortcuts. We built our own database engine from scratch because off-the-shelf options didn’t meet our bar for performance, encryption, and failure recovery. You feel the difference in everyday use.

FAQ

Q: Is my data safe in a proprietary format? What if I ever need to move it out?

A: Yes - and we don’t lock you in. AllMyNotes lets you export your data at any time. If you ever want to leave (we’d be sad, but no hard feelings), your notes come with you. We also have a free Lite Edition that can open and edit any .ddb file - so even without a Deluxe license, your data is always accessible to you.

Q: Why does my .ddb file use ~7 bytes per character of text?

A: A few reasons add up: Unicode storage (2 bytes per character), text duplicated in two places for safety, a search hash stored alongside each record, and a small pre-allocation for faster writes. Storage space is cheap - data safety and speed are worth it.

Q: Does AllMyNotes compress data?

A: Images are stored in compressed .png format, which saves significant space. Plain text is tiny even uncompressed - we skip the compression step there to keep things fast.

Still have questions? Contact us - we’re real people and we read these.