12 ms·

I was an Evernote Premium customer and enjoyed multi-device syncing and private notebooks. I had my own account, paid for out of my own pocket for a year. The c

I was an Evernote Premium customer and enjoyed multi-device syncing and private notebooks. I had my own account, paid for out of my own pocket for a year. The company I worked for also decided to used Evernote and I could see our "Team" notebooks, right along with my stuff. When the company stopped using it, not only did I lose the "Team" notebooks, it took all of my personal data with it. I lost everything. Support acknowledged it was a bug and told me that there was nothing they could do. They didn't even offer to let me have a few months free to catch back up and re-create my notebooks.

alanh 11y ago
Once my Evernote underwent a dramatic sync error, resulting in duplicates of all my notes. Evernote support's only help was to suggest I use Time Machine to recreate my notebook. They couldn't move the notebook back in time or anything like that.
rsync 11y ago
That is incredible. I'm sorry that behavior like that exists and that service providers can be so terrible at what they do. It also sounds like an implied admission, on the part of evernote, of not having working backups ? I would think that they would have found some way any way to get your data back to you given what just happened.
- ma2rten 11y ago
  That might just mean that they delete all backups when the account gets deleted for privacy reasons.
  - yabatopia 11y ago
    That's why I create backups of my Evernote databases regularly. You never know.
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    Depending on the backup tech, that can be kind of difficult. I can't run arbitrary SQL against the database backups I've got stored in tarsnap. Nor against tape, etc. For that matter, isn't the (or one) reason for having a backup so that errant deletes don't obliterate everything?
    - rokhayakebe 11y ago
      I was always under the impression that nothing really gets deleted online.
      - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
        In the short term you're absolutely correct. In the long term everything suffers from "data decay". It's just too hard to keep old files around forever. E.g. there were comments I made on Usenet many years ago. Google has previously attempted to preserve those, but they seem to be fading away into the ether. That's okay by me.
        bwohlergo 11y ago
        the files are mostly there... its just too troublesome for the companies to access the files for one user
      - hueving 11y ago
        That only applies to things you want deleted.
      - timdierks 11y ago
        It is, in fact, really hard to be ablet to delete data from an online service, while also not raising the chance of losing it accidentally. But if you treat it as an engineering goal from the start, it's possible. (Disclaimer: I work for Google, and we work very hard on this.)
    - mcpherrinm 11y ago
      Deleting the encryption keys for that customer's data is an effective way, and arranging your key storage such that keys can be deleted from backups is more doable.
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    My account once decided to throw away several dozen notes for no good reason (I had deleted a bunch of conflicting changes over several months, and when I emptied the trash, it wiped all the corresponding current notes on the server and all three of my devices). Evernote support couldn't do anything about it. They also took like two weeks to respond to my problem ticket. I'd submitted it on New Year's Eve, so I anticipated having to wait a day or two, but that was pretty ridiculous.
  - xerophyte12932 11y ago
    Thanks for pointing that out. If a company shuts down their account I suppose it's actually a feature that copies of their notebooks be deleted from every employee's system. Though the glitch is when personal notebooks are deleted. I think a middle ground would be a two step deletion, no? Step1 : Delete from everyone's machine but keep a backup for X days to allow people to file complaints etc. Step2 : Delete Backup
- onedev 11y ago
  This is a hilarious comment coming from a user named "rsync"
  - patio11 11y ago
    rsync operates rsync.net, an online backup company. They have a longstanding professional interest (and expertise) regarding these issues.
  - beachstartup 11y ago
    he runs rsync.net
jzwinck 11y ago
Does this imply they do not have backups? Or did they offer some other explanation?
- jason_slack 11y ago
  The reasoning I lost the data was actually a permissions issue, I think. I was an individual person, paying a Premium subscription and when the company I worked for signed up something happened to where they owned my notebooks. The company stopped using it, there went my stuff too.
copperx 11y ago
This is insane. Although I believe Evernote is one of the few products that allow you to export your data.
- yarrel 11y ago
  Any product that doesn't allow you to export your data is broken.
- etrautmann 11y ago
  how do you export? Last time I checked I could only export individual notes, which is obviously not a working solution given that I have thousands of notes.
  - jarfil 11y ago
    In the desktop app, select all notes, click export, or... right click on "Notebooks", select export. It lets you export in ENEX format, which is fully re-importable back to Evernote, or as HTML web pages.
    - lcmatt 11y ago
      While it reimports everything into Evernote it doesn't keep the notebooks or stacks you've setup. Really annoying if you're importing in to another account.
- lemevi 11y ago
  Exporting your Dropbox data is just dragging your files out of the dropbox folder or just turning off synching. I mean it doesn't include your event log or old stuff and you have to have separate client applications for the things Evernote does (like web clippings etc) but yeah, Dropbox. I have not lost any data with it and I was able to recover data I did lose through their amazing deleted item retrieval tool.
yanokwa 11y ago
Evernote is notoriously bad at keeping notes. http://jasonkincaid.net/2014/01/evernote-the-bug-ridden-elephant/ http://jasonkincaid.net/2014/01/evernote-the-bug-ridden-elep...
pconner 11y ago
Evernote is probably the buggiest "professional" software I've ever used. While I never lost all of my data, I lost a few individual notes, and I lost formatting on my notes (e.g. bullet points/numbers) so frequently that I just resorted to using plaintext/whitespace formatting.
- FreakyT 11y ago
  > I lost formatting on my notes (e.g. bullet points/numbers) so frequently that I just resorted to using plaintext/whitespace formatting. So glad to see that I wasn't the only one. OneNote got the list formatting right in its original version (2003!), yet Evernote has steadfastly refused to do anything about how bad their own implementation is.
- philliphaydon 11y ago
  I wanted to create a competitor ages ago using markdown. But in the end I just resorted to using notepad and wunderlist. I've had too many problems with evernote in the past. Random formatting and data lost. Support always being hopeless. I threw in the towel.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bro-stick 11y ago
CloudHQ will migrate to Google Drive, Dropbox or etc. for free.
tempestn 11y ago
That's horrid. This is exactly the kind of thing Evernote should be prioritizing above all else. It is a good example of why it's so important to keep your own incremental backups though. I wouldn't be comfortable relying on EN as much as I do if I didn't sync and back up my entire note store. (Similarly, although I trust Google's reliability far more, I still keep and back up a local sync of my email.)
- developer1 11y ago
  While it sounds excessive that a company has so many worldwide offices to even have 3 to close, good luck having them focus on important problems with their software if any of those 47 layoffs included developers. This kind of fatal flaw that can result in data loss makes it sound like they prioritize new features and marketing above the product itself.
Myrmornis 11y ago
This doesn't help OP but I am new to evernote and naively excited about it. One thing I like about it is that I can export my notebooks to an XML text format that contains the encoded images. So it seems to me that I can put my notebooks into git and not worry about losing anything. This thread is making me think I should investigate whether that is automatable; I was assuming it would be.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mgkimsal 11y ago
  > So it seems to me that I can put my notebooks into git and not worry about losing anything most of the point of paying for evernote is they should remove the worry about losing anything. Their entire point for being is to record your notes. And keep them safe and accessible. If there's a statistically noticeable chance that they will lose some or all of your data, they have no substantive value.
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    Exactly. A big part of Evernote's appeal to me was that, synced across three devices and the cloud, my data would be safe even if my house burned down. Then Evernote decided to delete several dozen of my notes from their server, and helpfully synced that change to all my devices. I'm currently looking for a replacement that suits my needs. Microsoft OneNote looks promising, now that it has Mac/Android support.
  - Myrmornis 11y ago
    I disagree. That's not the attraction for me. The attraction for me (personally) is that they have nice image capture and processing software that allows me to link diagrams and math from my paper notebooks to electronic documents with a quick picture taken on my phone. They're a private corporation and not one that is too large to fail; I wouldn't rely on them to not lose my data, I would use something like git for that.
lukefreiler 11y ago
I recently lost nearly a days writing - but apparently they only do a back-up every 8 hours, and I was off by one (I don't write in Evernote anymore, lesson learned). They did try to placate with 3 months free (after being a paying customer for years), but I'm just amazed that with the ~$300M of VC they've raised, they still haven't caught up to the real-time sync of Google Docs of 8+ years ago. Hopefully their new focus (i.e. sync) is aiming to at least match that. I'd have moved by now if I could find something that was both highly cross-platform (Mac/Win/iOS) and lighter (Markdown pretty please).
- rodgerd 11y ago
  > I'd have moved by now if I could find something that was both highly cross-platform (Mac/Win/iOS) and lighter (Markdown pretty please). I've compromised on OneNote, which isn't lightweight, but has become impressively cross-platform.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    I personally have been using git more and more for my note taking. I use RStudio and RMarkdown for my notes and it has been great and easily spread to all my personal devices.
    - chipperyman573 11y ago
      Hmm, that's an interesting solution. You could always combine this with a private github repo and get easy-to-browse note-taking. It does seem like having to manually sync would be annoying though, is it really better than solutions like GDocs?
      - 4lun 11y ago
        You could automate it using something like https://github.com/nevik/gitwatch https://github.com/nevik/gitwatch
      - baldfat 11y ago
repple 11y ago
Although nowhere near to your situation, I lost important meeting notes after a conference call. After making some formatting modifications (cut/copy/paste) to organize the notes, I found myself not being able to restore any text by undo-ing some of the inadvertent changes I made. Having been burned by a feature so basic to document editing as Undo, my next steps were basically to export all of my business notes and stop using the service for any work related activities. If not for this incident, I would probably keep using it.
- stephen_g 11y ago
  I had a similar experience. After two or three times losing large amounts of work, and finding absolutely no way to get back to an older revision in the free version, I stopped using the product. I may have gone to the premium service if it hadn't been so buggy.
  - pmikesell 11y ago
    I've had the same experience. If they'd literally done nothing but make sure the product doesn't lose data in the last two years since they last CEO announced a refocus on quality they'd be in a much better spot. With people's data you don't really get a second chance. Evernote seems to treat dataloss as "well, you know, it's only a couple of kbytes we lost of yours" - while to the customer what they lost has disproportionately more value than the amount implies. As for me, I'm now a lifer anti-customer of Evernote.
twhb 11y ago
I sound like a cynic when I say this, but the root cause of failures like this is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application. If all your data exists in a file hierachy that you can browse, edit manually, and back up, then you have the safety of relying only on foundational systems for the survival of your data, and the power to use your data as you please with tools of your choosing. But if the application owns your data—if it stores it behind the scenes and never exposes it to you directly—then your data is exactly as fragile as that application. If there’s a bug, your data can disappear. If the company goes under, your application can rot to unusability. If the product is discontinued, the same. If the company kills a feature, you have to do without it. Or, most likely of all, the company could start publishing buggier and buggier updates, and you’ll have no choice but to use buggier and buggier software. It seems like a clear choice to me: if the data is anything I value, I must have direct access to it, regardless of what tools I use to manipulate it. The only data I let websites or applications own is data I’d be OK with losing.
- CrackpotGonzo 11y ago
  Completely agree with this and I think the model of an application that accesses data is the only one I will trust going forward. Great example of this is Scrivener. I can have my files locally stored or in the cloud, but Scrivener just accesses, not owns the files.
- choppaface 11y ago
  This is a great point. There's an analagous situation in finance: would you rather have a single mutual fund own all your investment money, or do you want a brokerage account with some active management? The latter is definitely more complicated but gives the user more control, accountability, visibility, etc. While it makes sense for a Whole Product to want to hide this complexity and liquidity from the user, any long-term user will very likely want it after they've learned to use the product.
  - tempestn 11y ago
    Actually I'd say a large percentage of people would be very well served by a globally diversified index fund for all their equity holdings... And perhaps the analogy is still useful. I'm ok with that situation because I understand and accept the logic of indexing. If the fund I owned changed their prospectus and decided to start active management, or significantly increased their management fee, or whatever, I could pull my money out and invest it elsewhere. Similarly in software there are definite advantages to having a dedicated steward for a given type of data, but it's much better if there is some way to take your data back should you decide to put it elsewhere. With Evernote, it is possible to export all your notes in a variety of formats, including XML, which can then be imported into other note taking applications if you wish. So to me, the bare fact that the application controls the data isn't necessarily an issue. What was becoming an issue was the fact that they didn't appear to treat it with sufficient respect. I hope we'll see that start to change now.
slaxman 11y ago
Out of curiousity, What made you choose Evernote over Google Drive? Doesn't Google Drive offer the same features? I haven't used Evernote and use Google docs to store my notes instead.
- jason_slack 11y ago
  honestly it was mostly presentation. Evernote has an interface that made it easy for me to take notes, update, attach pictures, store all of those notes in a notebook. GD feels just like a filesystem to me. At that time. Now I actually use GD for this.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
gaurangagrawal 11y ago
I haven't experienced this so far but after reading about your experience, I just took backup of my evernotes.
mlrtime 11y ago
What I end up doing is storing my evernote project folder in dropbox. Funny enough evernote detects this and warns me, but I know dropbox won't loose my files.
smrtinsert 11y ago
Sounds very similar to the dropbox for business issue that happened a few years ago. I wonder in what universe these storagey providers think this is possibly ok.
lawlitta 11y ago
Hi Jason - I work at Evernote and would like to look at your support ticket with our management team to figure out what happened. Will you please let me know your ticket number? Thanks in advance. Please know that we're here to help.

alanh 11y ago

Once my Evernote underwent a dramatic sync error, resulting in duplicates of all my notes. Evernote support's only help was to suggest I use Time Machine to recreate my notebook. They couldn't move the notebook back in time or anything like that.

rsync 11y ago

That is incredible. I'm sorry that behavior like that exists and that service providers can be so terrible at what they do. It also sounds like an implied admission, on the part of evernote, of not having working backups ? I would think that they would have found some way any way to get your data back to you given what just happened.

ma2rten 11y ago
That might just mean that they delete all backups when the account gets deleted for privacy reasons.
- yabatopia 11y ago
  That's why I create backups of my Evernote databases regularly. You never know.
- tedunangst 11y ago
  Depending on the backup tech, that can be kind of difficult. I can't run arbitrary SQL against the database backups I've got stored in tarsnap. Nor against tape, etc. For that matter, isn't the (or one) reason for having a backup so that errant deletes don't obliterate everything?
  - rokhayakebe 11y ago
    I was always under the impression that nothing really gets deleted online.
    - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
      In the short term you're absolutely correct. In the long term everything suffers from "data decay". It's just too hard to keep old files around forever. E.g. there were comments I made on Usenet many years ago. Google has previously attempted to preserve those, but they seem to be fading away into the ether. That's okay by me.
      - bwohlergo 11y ago
        the files are mostly there... its just too troublesome for the companies to access the files for one user
    - hueving 11y ago
      That only applies to things you want deleted.
    - timdierks 11y ago
      It is, in fact, really hard to be ablet to delete data from an online service, while also not raising the chance of losing it accidentally. But if you treat it as an engineering goal from the start, it's possible. (Disclaimer: I work for Google, and we work very hard on this.)
  - mcpherrinm 11y ago
    Deleting the encryption keys for that customer's data is an effective way, and arranging your key storage such that keys can be deleted from backups is more doable.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  My account once decided to throw away several dozen notes for no good reason (I had deleted a bunch of conflicting changes over several months, and when I emptied the trash, it wiped all the corresponding current notes on the server and all three of my devices). Evernote support couldn't do anything about it. They also took like two weeks to respond to my problem ticket. I'd submitted it on New Year's Eve, so I anticipated having to wait a day or two, but that was pretty ridiculous.
- xerophyte12932 11y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out. If a company shuts down their account I suppose it's actually a feature that copies of their notebooks be deleted from every employee's system. Though the glitch is when personal notebooks are deleted. I think a middle ground would be a two step deletion, no? Step1 : Delete from everyone's machine but keep a backup for X days to allow people to file complaints etc. Step2 : Delete Backup
onedev 11y ago
This is a hilarious comment coming from a user named "rsync"
- patio11 11y ago
  rsync operates rsync.net, an online backup company. They have a longstanding professional interest (and expertise) regarding these issues.
- beachstartup 11y ago
  he runs rsync.net

jzwinck 11y ago

Does this imply they do not have backups? Or did they offer some other explanation?

jason_slack 11y ago
The reasoning I lost the data was actually a permissions issue, I think. I was an individual person, paying a Premium subscription and when the company I worked for signed up something happened to where they owned my notebooks. The company stopped using it, there went my stuff too.

copperx 11y ago

This is insane. Although I believe Evernote is one of the few products that allow you to export your data.

yarrel 11y ago
Any product that doesn't allow you to export your data is broken.
etrautmann 11y ago
how do you export? Last time I checked I could only export individual notes, which is obviously not a working solution given that I have thousands of notes.
- jarfil 11y ago
  In the desktop app, select all notes, click export, or... right click on "Notebooks", select export. It lets you export in ENEX format, which is fully re-importable back to Evernote, or as HTML web pages.
  - lcmatt 11y ago
    While it reimports everything into Evernote it doesn't keep the notebooks or stacks you've setup. Really annoying if you're importing in to another account.
lemevi 11y ago
Exporting your Dropbox data is just dragging your files out of the dropbox folder or just turning off synching. I mean it doesn't include your event log or old stuff and you have to have separate client applications for the things Evernote does (like web clippings etc) but yeah, Dropbox. I have not lost any data with it and I was able to recover data I did lose through their amazing deleted item retrieval tool.

yanokwa 11y ago

Evernote is notoriously bad at keeping notes. http://jasonkincaid.net/2014/01/evernote-the-bug-ridden-elephant/ http://jasonkincaid.net/2014/01/evernote-the-bug-ridden-elep...

pconner 11y ago

Evernote is probably the buggiest "professional" software I've ever used. While I never lost all of my data, I lost a few individual notes, and I lost formatting on my notes (e.g. bullet points/numbers) so frequently that I just resorted to using plaintext/whitespace formatting.

FreakyT 11y ago
> I lost formatting on my notes (e.g. bullet points/numbers) so frequently that I just resorted to using plaintext/whitespace formatting. So glad to see that I wasn't the only one. OneNote got the list formatting right in its original version (2003!), yet Evernote has steadfastly refused to do anything about how bad their own implementation is.
philliphaydon 11y ago
I wanted to create a competitor ages ago using markdown. But in the end I just resorted to using notepad and wunderlist. I've had too many problems with evernote in the past. Random formatting and data lost. Support always being hopeless. I threw in the towel.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

bro-stick 11y ago

CloudHQ will migrate to Google Drive, Dropbox or etc. for free.

tempestn 11y ago

That's horrid. This is exactly the kind of thing Evernote should be prioritizing above all else. It is a good example of why it's so important to keep your own incremental backups though. I wouldn't be comfortable relying on EN as much as I do if I didn't sync and back up my entire note store. (Similarly, although I trust Google's reliability far more, I still keep and back up a local sync of my email.)

developer1 11y ago
While it sounds excessive that a company has so many worldwide offices to even have 3 to close, good luck having them focus on important problems with their software if any of those 47 layoffs included developers. This kind of fatal flaw that can result in data loss makes it sound like they prioritize new features and marketing above the product itself.

Myrmornis 11y ago

This doesn't help OP but I am new to evernote and naively excited about it. One thing I like about it is that I can export my notebooks to an XML text format that contains the encoded images. So it seems to me that I can put my notebooks into git and not worry about losing anything. This thread is making me think I should investigate whether that is automatable; I was assuming it would be.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mgkimsal 11y ago
> So it seems to me that I can put my notebooks into git and not worry about losing anything most of the point of paying for evernote is they should remove the worry about losing anything. Their entire point for being is to record your notes. And keep them safe and accessible. If there's a statistically noticeable chance that they will lose some or all of your data, they have no substantive value.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  Exactly. A big part of Evernote's appeal to me was that, synced across three devices and the cloud, my data would be safe even if my house burned down. Then Evernote decided to delete several dozen of my notes from their server, and helpfully synced that change to all my devices. I'm currently looking for a replacement that suits my needs. Microsoft OneNote looks promising, now that it has Mac/Android support.
- Myrmornis 11y ago
  I disagree. That's not the attraction for me. The attraction for me (personally) is that they have nice image capture and processing software that allows me to link diagrams and math from my paper notebooks to electronic documents with a quick picture taken on my phone. They're a private corporation and not one that is too large to fail; I wouldn't rely on them to not lose my data, I would use something like git for that.

lukefreiler 11y ago

I recently lost nearly a days writing - but apparently they only do a back-up every 8 hours, and I was off by one (I don't write in Evernote anymore, lesson learned). They did try to placate with 3 months free (after being a paying customer for years), but I'm just amazed that with the ~$300M of VC they've raised, they still haven't caught up to the real-time sync of Google Docs of 8+ years ago. Hopefully their new focus (i.e. sync) is aiming to at least match that. I'd have moved by now if I could find something that was both highly cross-platform (Mac/Win/iOS) and lighter (Markdown pretty please).

rodgerd 11y ago
> I'd have moved by now if I could find something that was both highly cross-platform (Mac/Win/iOS) and lighter (Markdown pretty please). I've compromised on OneNote, which isn't lightweight, but has become impressively cross-platform.
- baldfat 11y ago
  I personally have been using git more and more for my note taking. I use RStudio and RMarkdown for my notes and it has been great and easily spread to all my personal devices.
  - chipperyman573 11y ago
    Hmm, that's an interesting solution. You could always combine this with a private github repo and get easy-to-browse note-taking. It does seem like having to manually sync would be annoying though, is it really better than solutions like GDocs?
    - 4lun 11y ago
      You could automate it using something like https://github.com/nevik/gitwatch https://github.com/nevik/gitwatch
    - baldfat 11y ago

repple 11y ago

Although nowhere near to your situation, I lost important meeting notes after a conference call. After making some formatting modifications (cut/copy/paste) to organize the notes, I found myself not being able to restore any text by undo-ing some of the inadvertent changes I made. Having been burned by a feature so basic to document editing as Undo, my next steps were basically to export all of my business notes and stop using the service for any work related activities. If not for this incident, I would probably keep using it.

stephen_g 11y ago
I had a similar experience. After two or three times losing large amounts of work, and finding absolutely no way to get back to an older revision in the free version, I stopped using the product. I may have gone to the premium service if it hadn't been so buggy.
- pmikesell 11y ago
  I've had the same experience. If they'd literally done nothing but make sure the product doesn't lose data in the last two years since they last CEO announced a refocus on quality they'd be in a much better spot. With people's data you don't really get a second chance. Evernote seems to treat dataloss as "well, you know, it's only a couple of kbytes we lost of yours" - while to the customer what they lost has disproportionately more value than the amount implies. As for me, I'm now a lifer anti-customer of Evernote.

twhb 11y ago

I sound like a cynic when I say this, but the root cause of failures like this is a principle fundamental to Evernote: data owned by an application, rather than data accessed by an application. If all your data exists in a file hierachy that you can browse, edit manually, and back up, then you have the safety of relying only on foundational systems for the survival of your data, and the power to use your data as you please with tools of your choosing. But if the application owns your data—if it stores it behind the scenes and never exposes it to you directly—then your data is exactly as fragile as that application. If there’s a bug, your data can disappear. If the company goes under, your application can rot to unusability. If the product is discontinued, the same. If the company kills a feature, you have to do without it. Or, most likely of all, the company could start publishing buggier and buggier updates, and you’ll have no choice but to use buggier and buggier software. It seems like a clear choice to me: if the data is anything I value, I must have direct access to it, regardless of what tools I use to manipulate it. The only data I let websites or applications own is data I’d be OK with losing.

CrackpotGonzo 11y ago
Completely agree with this and I think the model of an application that accesses data is the only one I will trust going forward. Great example of this is Scrivener. I can have my files locally stored or in the cloud, but Scrivener just accesses, not owns the files.
choppaface 11y ago
This is a great point. There's an analagous situation in finance: would you rather have a single mutual fund own all your investment money, or do you want a brokerage account with some active management? The latter is definitely more complicated but gives the user more control, accountability, visibility, etc. While it makes sense for a Whole Product to want to hide this complexity and liquidity from the user, any long-term user will very likely want it after they've learned to use the product.
- tempestn 11y ago
  Actually I'd say a large percentage of people would be very well served by a globally diversified index fund for all their equity holdings... And perhaps the analogy is still useful. I'm ok with that situation because I understand and accept the logic of indexing. If the fund I owned changed their prospectus and decided to start active management, or significantly increased their management fee, or whatever, I could pull my money out and invest it elsewhere. Similarly in software there are definite advantages to having a dedicated steward for a given type of data, but it's much better if there is some way to take your data back should you decide to put it elsewhere. With Evernote, it is possible to export all your notes in a variety of formats, including XML, which can then be imported into other note taking applications if you wish. So to me, the bare fact that the application controls the data isn't necessarily an issue. What was becoming an issue was the fact that they didn't appear to treat it with sufficient respect. I hope we'll see that start to change now.

slaxman 11y ago

Out of curiousity, What made you choose Evernote over Google Drive? Doesn't Google Drive offer the same features? I haven't used Evernote and use Google docs to store my notes instead.

jason_slack 11y ago
honestly it was mostly presentation. Evernote has an interface that made it easy for me to take notes, update, attach pictures, store all of those notes in a notebook. GD feels just like a filesystem to me. At that time. Now I actually use GD for this.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

gaurangagrawal 11y ago

I haven't experienced this so far but after reading about your experience, I just took backup of my evernotes.

mlrtime 11y ago

What I end up doing is storing my evernote project folder in dropbox. Funny enough evernote detects this and warns me, but I know dropbox won't loose my files.

smrtinsert 11y ago

Sounds very similar to the dropbox for business issue that happened a few years ago. I wonder in what universe these storagey providers think this is possibly ok.

lawlitta 11y ago

Hi Jason - I work at Evernote and would like to look at your support ticket with our management team to figure out what happened. Will you please let me know your ticket number? Thanks in advance. Please know that we're here to help.