Self-Host Memos with Greffon
Quick notes are the most personal thing you type all day. Memos is a small, fast place to keep them, and a greffer you own is a good place to keep Memos. Here is the honest setup.
The notes you jot in passing are some of the most personal text you produce: half-formed ideas, reminders, snippets you meant to come back to. Memos is a lightweight, privacy-first hub for exactly that kind of writing, somewhere between a scratchpad and a microblog. Self-hosting it answers a simple question plainly: those notes live on a machine you own, not an account you rent. Greffon takes the fiddly parts off your plate.
Why own your notes
Memos is small and fast. It is a single service backed by a local database, designed for quick capture and a clean timeline of everything you have written. That lightness is the point: it runs comfortably on a modest greffer without asking for much, and there is no third party sitting between you and your own jottings.
Owning it means the data is yours in the literal sense. The notes sit in a database file on a disk you control, and nothing leaves the greffer unless you send it somewhere. For a tool you reach for dozens of times a day, that is a quieter kind of privacy than a hosted note app can offer.
Graft it from the catalog
On a greffer, you do not hand-write a compose file or wire a reverse proxy. Pick Memos from the catalog and graft it onto your greffer. Greffon issues the certificate and routes the app, so it comes up reachable over HTTPS without you assembling that plumbing by hand.
Reach it from anywhere
Memos is a plain HTTP web app, which makes external access straightforward. On the same network as your greffer it works the moment it starts. To reach it from your phone on the road, you have two honest options.
The simplest is tunnel mode: a greffer connects outbound to the manager's Stem tunnel and serves its apps without opening a single inbound port, which is the answer for a box behind NAT or CGNAT with no public IP. Because Memos is HTTP, the tunnel carries it cleanly. If you would rather expose the greffer directly, port forwarding plus dynamic DNS still works. Either way your notes stay reachable over HTTPS.
Storage and memory
Memos is light on memory, so an inexpensive greffer handles it without strain. The thing that actually grows over time is storage, and it grows in two ways. The database itself stays small (it is mostly text), but the attachments you upload (images, files dropped into a memo) land on disk and add up. If you paste a lot of screenshots, keep an eye on free space on the greffer.
This is a real tradeoff worth naming up front: a hosted note service absorbs storage growth invisibly, but on your own greffer the disk is finite and yours to manage. The upside is that you can see exactly what is using it.
Back it up
Notes feel disposable until the day you lose them. Memos keeps your data in a database file plus an attachments directory, and both deserve a backup. Greffon handles TLS and routing today, and native one-click backups are coming in M2. Until then, bring your own backup tool (restic or borgbackup are the usual choices), back up the Memos data on a schedule, and store a copy off the greffer.
Keep it always-on
You will capture notes at odd hours from whatever device is closest, so Memos needs to be up when you are. Run it on an always-on greffer, a small VPS, a mini-PC, or a free Oracle Cloud box, rather than a laptop that sleeps at night. The Oracle walkthrough is a good place to get a greffer running before you graft Memos onto it.
