Supernote Partner vs Syncthing: Getting Daily Notes Off the Tablet Without Ratta’s Cloud

Ratta will sell you a tablet that feels like paper and then, gently, a cloud that feels like a lease. Supernote Partner is the official way to see today’s notes on a laptop. It is also the official way to discover that “your” notebook lives in someone else’s sync protocol until you export it on purpose.

I wanted the opposite: write on the A5, have a folder of pages show up on the machine that already runs Syncthing, and never create a Ratta account I have to remember in 2029. That handoff is the same architecture as e-ink notes to Obsidian: tablet captures, desktop consolidates. That is possible. It is not the path the Partner installer wants you to take. The gap is not ideology. It is what still works when the tablet is in a bag and the only computer awake is a NAS in another room.

What Partner actually moves

Partner is a companion, not a file manager. It talks to Supernote Cloud (or to a USB session) and presents notebooks the way the tablet presents them: titles, covers, digest text if you paid for the recognition extras. Export to PNG, PDF, or TXT is a feature of that relationship. The .note files themselves are not a portable format you casually open in another app. If Partner is your only bridge, you are always one export click away from a real archive.

Wireless Partner sync is the comfort setting. The tablet uploads. The laptop downloads. You see pages without a cable. You also accept that the comfortable path is Ratta’s servers, Ratta’s account recovery, Ratta’s idea of a conflict when you edited a title on two devices. I have never lost a notebook to that cloud. I have lost an afternoon to a stuck digest job and a Partner window that showed last Tuesday.

USB Partner is the quieter sibling. Same app, local cable, less romance. Files can come off without a login if you stay in the document export flow. People skip it because it feels like 2009. It is also the last mode that still works when you decide the account is optional.

Why Syncthing is not an app you install on the tablet

Boox owners get this wrong first. They assume you sideload Syncthing, point it at /notes, and walk away. Supernote is not that Android. The OS is a locked reading-and-writing appliance. There is no supported Syncthing client on the device, and community hacks that treat it like a general Linux box are a different article — one that ends with a warranty shrug.

The Syncthing path is therefore a two-hop:

1. Get pages off the tablet into a folder a real computer can see.
2. Let Syncthing replicate that folder to the vault, the laptop, the phone if you insist.

Hop one is the whole argument. Partner can be hop one. A USB mass-storage copy can be hop one. Official Dropbox or Drive folders can be hop one if you enjoy a third company’s cloud as a temporary tray. Syncthing never replaces the export. It replaces the second cloud you were about to add “just for backup.”

A cable-first export that Syncthing can trust

This is the boring setup that survived a year.

On the tablet, I keep daily notes in one notebook and project notes in dated folders — the usual Ratta tree. Once a day, or whenever a meeting actually mattered, I export those pages to PDF (for reading) and PNG (for Obsidian embeds). TXT export is there for search, and it is only as good as the handwriting and the recognition pass. I do not treat TXT as the source of truth. The source of truth is the page image plus the .note file I also copy when I do a full USB backup.

The laptop has a folder: ~/notes/supernote-inbox. That folder is a Syncthing share. The NAS has the same share. Obsidian on the laptop watches a vault that includes a supernote/ directory I periodically sort from the inbox. Nothing on the tablet knows Obsidian exists. Nothing in Syncthing knows Ratta exists.

Conflict behavior is then Syncthing’s, which I already understand: two computers wrote the same path, here is a conflict copy. Partner conflicts are moodier. They look like a sync spinner.

Where Partner still earns its icon

I have not deleted Partner. I open it when I need a digest I did not generate on-device, or when I want to flip through a notebook on a desktop screen without exporting fifty PNGs. The preview is the product. If you review long meeting notes on a 27-inch monitor, Partner is faster than opening a folder of page images.

Partner is also the recovery UI your less technical household member can use. “Open the app, wait for the notebook” beats “plug the USB cable, find EXPORT, don’t unplug during copy.” If the tablet is a shared household object, Partner is the path that does not generate a support ticket to you.

What I refuse is Partner as the only copy. Cloud-only is how you discover a dead account email the week you change jobs. Export-plus-Syncthing is how the same pages exist on a disk you already back up with the rest of the house.

The cloud features you actually give up

Be honest about the losses or the comparison is a sermon.

Hands-free wireless ingest. Without Partner cloud, new pages do not appear on the laptop while the tablet sits in another room. You export. That is a ritual. People who write ten pages a day will hate it. People who write a page and a list will not notice.

Digest and search as a service. Ratta’s recognition pipeline is convenient. Local OCR on exported PNGs is a weekend project — ocrmypdf, a private Whisper-like stack for nothing because these are images of ink, or a one-shot Tesseract pass that mangles your handwriting. I run a monthly OCR on PDFs I know I will search. Daily notes stay as images until I need them. That is a trade I accepted. If your job is searchable meeting minutes, Partner’s digest is the feature, and Syncthing is only the backup of the export.

Cross-device edit. Partner implies the notebook is live in more than one place. Syncthing of exports is not live ink. You will not continue a page on the laptop with the same stylus feel. If you wanted that, you bought the wrong device — buy a Boox or an iPad. Supernote is a paper simulator. Treat the laptop as a reader of yesterday’s paper.

Dropbox on the tablet is not a third way

Supernote’s official cloud folders feel like a compromise: no Partner, still a vendor. They are a different landlord. Files land in Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive, and then you can Syncthing… nothing, because those clients already sync, badly, with their own conflict rules. Mixing Dropbox and Syncthing on the same tree is how you get duplicate “conflicted copy” files of a PNG named page-003.

Pick one long-haul sync. If it is Syncthing, use the cloud folder only as a drop box you empty. If it is Dropbox, do not also Syncthing that path. I emptied Dropbox after the third duplicate digest PDF and went back to USB.

A weekly full backup is not optional

Exporting today’s pages is not a device backup. The .note files, the templates, the extras — those need a periodic USB copy of the document tree into a Syncthing share named something like supernote-raw. I do it on Sundays. It is ugly. It is also the only file that will open again on another Supernote if this one dies.

Partner cloud is a backup until it is not: export limits, account issues, a format change. A raw folder on the NAS is a backup you can hash. I keep the last two weekly trees. The inbox of daily PDFs is for reading. The raw tree is for disaster.

Failure modes I hit in practice

Partial export. I exported a notebook, unplugged, and found three missing pages at the end. The tablet had not finished writing the last PDFs. The fix is boring: watch the export folder size settle, then unplug. Syncthing then replicated an incomplete set to the NAS before I noticed. I now export to a staging directory and only move into the Syncthing share when the page count matches the notebook.

Filename collisions. Default export names are not unique across notebooks. Two “Meeting” PDFs overwrite in a flat inbox. I prefix with the notebook title and an ISO date in the export step when the UI allows, or I rename in staging. Syncthing will not save you from a bad name.

Partner reopen after a raw copy. If you keep using Partner cloud and also copy .note files around, you can confuse yourself about which copy is newest. I disable wireless Partner sync on weeks I am doing raw backups, or I treat Partner as view-only. Two writers, one notebook, no merge tool.

Who should stay on Partner cloud

Stay if you travel with only the tablet and a phone, and you need today’s pages on the phone tonight without a laptop in the hotel. Stay if digest search is the reason you bought the device. Stay if USB is a fight with the one computer you own (locked-down work laptop, no Syncthing allowed).

Leave if you already run Syncthing for photos and documents, if you want notes in a vault you control, and if you can stand a daily or weekly export ritual. The tablet remains excellent. The cloud was never the paper.

The rule I ended on

Partner is a viewer and an occasional digest machine. Syncthing is the transport for files that have already left the tablet. Ratta’s cloud is optional infrastructure, not the notebook.

Once you believe that, the marketing page about “seamless sync” reads as a description of their product, not a requirement of yours. Write on the glass. Export on purpose. Let the folder move the way the rest of your house already moves files. The Partner icon can stay in the dock. It does not get to be the only door.