4 ms·
As a paying user for years, I've had Evernote lose data many times -- sometimes important, irreplaceable data that I hadn't yet had time to back up elsewhere.
by veidr 13y ago
As a paying user for years, I've had Evernote lose data many times -- sometimes important, irreplaceable data that I hadn't yet had time to back up elsewhere.
Evernote is some of the very worst software that has ever survived more than a few months on my computer without being deleted. Horrible show-stopping crash/data loss bugs are the norm, and have been increasing steadily as they add feature after feature with apparently no quality control at all.
Fundamentally, the job Evernote does (for me, but I assume also for most users with thousands of notes) is too important to delegate to a halfassed vc-backed startup that flies its engineers economy and has never heard of an integration test.
But replacing it isn't yet possible. It syncs across all platforms I use, does OCR of everything in both Japanese and English, including handwriting and text in photos, works out of the box with all my paper document scanners... There's just nothing else on the market (or if there is, PLEASE TELL ME!!) that does all that.
So Evernote hasn't lost me as a customer, yet. They've seemingly made a spectacular effort to do so, but... Life without Evernote would still be, on balance, more painful than with it.
But life with it is indeed pretty fucking painful, too.
- belluchan 13y agoUse time machine or something like time machine to back up your data. Then you can recover it when Evernote craps up later.
- hrktb 13y agoI've tried Evernote for a while with various strategies. Time machine saves you if you have an always on machine with Evernote permanently syncing. If you can't have that setup, for everything you do on the go or not on your mac, you won't have a back up. Depending on how you do it IFTTT can help save notes to other services (you have to save the note in authorized notebook if I remember well) but it's still a PITA. Globally having Evernote feed another system reliably seems to be really tricky, as nowadays having two cloud based system play nice with each other is usually a world of hurts.
- eitland 13y agoOneNote is getting seriously good now and syncs to android and web. Still waiting for a native linux client though :-)
- pmikesell 13y agoI don't understand how you can lose important irreplaceable data but still continue to use the product. Evernote lost a set of conference notes for me. It wasn't the most important thing in the world, but it was something I went through the effort of capturing and then wasn't able to get to when I needed it. That was enough for me. If I can't trust it, it's useless.
- engelhorn 13y agoI use DEVONthink Pro Office from www.devontechnologies.com to collect, tag and organize snapshots of web pages (either as webarchive, pdf or instapaperized pdfs), referenced OmniOutliner documents containing more complex notes, ocr'ed screenshots and other research stuff. It is more a conventional or even traditional app than a cloud based service. Imported that .enex file when I left Evernote.
- da_maire 13y agoI knew things were going south with Evernote when they added a store that sells fucking socks and backpacks while the Mac client still couldn't edit existing tables in documents. The table editing limitation was eventually fixed but much more serious problems have since cropped up. Sync issues and the unusably slow iOS client caused me to drop it for personal use a few months ago, now it's relegated to only work notes with the desktop client. For this really basic purpose it's alright, it has a few major annoyances and the interface has gotten much worse over the years but it'd be too much effort to migrate to something else and keep my tags/notebooks. This is not a healthy relationship I have with Evernote Corporation. I committed to their product but they didn't commit to me.