When I started my cyber security student journey back in 2015, I knew that I was going to need to start documenting all the tricks, commands, and techniques somewhere. I used google docs early on for everything. But this quickly ballooned into an unmanageable document. It wasn’t until I discovered The Cyber Mentor’s course, that I discovered Cherry Tree.
Before I switched to a better solution my main google word document was around 300 pages. And it was filled with screenshots too;. The document was so big and cluttered that it started to take upwards of a minute to even load. It was clunky, so I added a table of contents and internal bookmarks to jump between sections. It seemed like there should be a better way.
It wasn’t until I took the Cyber Mentor’s Zero to Hero youtube series (before the Udemy course) that I even heard about Keep Note or Cherry Tree. Keep Note had just started to become un maintained, so I started using Cherry Tree.
I liked Cherry Tree, but a year later ran into issues. I had added so many screen shots and nodes that the files started to become corrupted. Luckily, I had uploaded some intermittent backup files to google drive every so often, otherwise I may have lost everything. This was a wakeup call for me, as I realized that Cherry Tree was bit too unstable for my uses.
I then explored multiple applications including Joplin, Obsidian, Notion and OneNote. In the end, I chose Microsoft OneNote. I preferred it because it automatically syncs to the cloud and you can launch multiple instances of the Desktop application at the same time.
This is what my OneNote looks like. I have each course that I’ve taken in one notebook, but in separate sections. In each section I have multiple nodes for each subject. When taking multiple courses, there will be some overlap of subject matter. But I find it better to keep every course unique and to not combine notes together. However, if there are common commands or important technques, I’ll add these to a more general section by itself and also add frequent commands to master cheatsheets.
Download a good screenshot program, windows snip just doesn’t cut it. Get Greenshot for Windows or Flameshot on Linux. You can quickly take screenshots with PrintScreen key and crop, add notes, arrows and other annotations. You can also easily blur or obscure sensitive information.