There are many horror stories on the web of users losing their data. I thought it was already well known that Evernote software cannot be trusted. Recently, two HN users made comments about data loss[1][2].<p>I'm baffled that users continue to trust it. I do understand that it's a slick product with nice features but if it fails the <i>primary</i> purpose (save the data <i>and also retrieve it</i> later), the GUI bells & whistles are meaningless. (Example[3].) In other words, programming a flashy drag&drop tool that saves data to /dev/null negates the point, right?<p>Personally, I've been using ASCII text files as "notebooks" for 20 years and have never lost a thing. Understandably, that workflow is not usable for mobile devices and cloud sync. For the folks that can't use text files, is there really no other alternative product to Evernote that has a reliable track record for <i>saving</i> the customers' data?<p>[1]<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7010258" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7010258</a><p>[2]<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7010558" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7010558</a><p>[3]<a href="http://jasonkincaid.net/2014/01/evernote-the-bug-ridden-elephant/" rel="nofollow">http://jasonkincaid.net/2014/01/evernote-the-bug-ridden-elep...</a>
One user experiences data corruption. Discovers that only one piece of data from entire store was not saved to cloud. Is nevertheless able to recover the corrupted data and resave to store and cloud. I'm not entirely sure this is sufficient reason to claim that the service is irredeemably flawed and should not be used.
If it's _important_ to you, back it up. No, backup does not mean to put it somewhere on a single cloud provider which can go belly up the next day or just fsck your files for any number of reasons (as seen in this example).<p>Put it either on multiple storage services at once, update it regularly, check that the backup works and put it on an offline disk and if it is even more important, put it in a fire grade safe or a safe place in a banks vault. Rotate those disks.<p>A rented bank vault is apx. 100 USD/y where I live. Well worth every cent.
According to Evernote's EDAM scheme (<a href="https://dev.evernote.com/media/pdf/edam-sync.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://dev.evernote.com/media/pdf/edam-sync.pdf</a>)<p>> the synchronization scheme pushes all of the record keeping and conflict resolution work onto the client so that the service can perform synchronization in a scalable “stateless” manner. This means that the client needs to keep track of the state of the server during each sync, and then use this information to send and receive updates on the next sync.<p>Does this means that, if an error occurs on the client side and this erroneous state is propagated to the server and other clients, the data would be lost for ever?
> If I didn’t tell you already, here’s my life’s story. I have only one Evernote note that matters. Everything is in that note. Like the college hostel room. It has my notes, flight ticket numbers, emails, project plan, reviews links and just about everything.<p>LOLWUT?<p>Yes, Evernote is at fault for data corruption, but the user also did everything in their power to make the effect as damaging as possible.<p>Do you keep all of your software project in a single file in Git and then complain that updates don't merge cleanly? No. That's a recipe for disaster. So why would you inflict a pathological case upon Evernote and then complain that it's behaving pathologically?
I also carry a ton of critical information in notes. I've tried extensively Apple's iCloud-synced notes, Evernote, and Microsoft's OneNote. Apple is poor at solving trivial conflicts. Evernote is even worse, and really unreliable. Microsoft OneNote is great at reliability and syncing (UX is so-so in mobile, that's the only gotcha). I wouldn't have expected so, but they have the upper hand here.
Evernote (both the web and Android apps) is one of the buggiest pieces of "professional" software I have ever used. When I use it to take notes for classes, I have given up on using any sort of special formatting (bullets, bold, etc) because I've had all of my formatting completely discarded so many times.
I think Evernote has first move advantage but the product is awful.<p>Really<p>The Web and the App load like Mammoths for something that supposedly just "take notes".<p>Now, why it can't sync a note silently like that? Size issues? Even a huge text is at most a couple of MBs. You don't even need to worry about sending diffs, you can probably compress and send it as is (and keep all the version history, it's text FFS)
There's another strong reason not to trust Evernote: nothing is encrypted at rest on your system or their servers, unless you manually go encrypt selected text in a specific note in the desktop application, where you have to make a new passphrase for each note you want this on. Even this was only recently upgraded from RC2 64-bit to AES 128-bit.<p>They claim they can't perform searches over encrypted data, but that doesn't seem too difficult to solve with an index file that's also encrypted.<p>Evernote does have some detailed security policies and 2FA, but without encryption at rest where only the user has the key, what's the point?
This is the main reason why I use Simplenote rather than Evernote. Its syncing mechanism is absolutely bulletproof and extremely fast, and my preferred desktop client (Resophnotes on windows), _also_ backs up all my notes as ASCII text files to Dropbox. Unlike Google Notes, it is cross-platform, running on _everything_.<p>Downside is that it only supports text, no rich data like Evernote. That's why it's called Simplenote. It's simple. But if that meets your needs, and it sounds like it does, give it a shot.<p><a href="http://simplenote.com/" rel="nofollow">http://simplenote.com/</a>
> "I'll now resort to manually backing up every Evernote file to Google Doc"<p>I don't think that's the lesson to take away from this...
It looks to me like the data was stored in a temporary cache and never got synced because the application crashed. It's an unfortunate experience, but not one that warrants a fearful take on Evernote. Things happen. I've typed a draft in Gmail before and it never got synced so I've lost it, but it doesn't make me stop using it. Maybe we all need to just take a deep breath and remember how it was before everything synced.
Evernote is my digital junk drawer. That's right, JUNK drawer. It works very well for this purpose, since it is easy to put stuff into, and (usually!) get stuff out of. Like my physical junk drawer, if I can't find something I usually just yell to anyone around, blaming them for moving my stuff.<p>I'd certainly caution anyone to store a single copy of anything truly important it it, but this is a good reminder.
I deplore Evernote because they destroyed Skitch, evidence that they place end users low in their priorities. This experience does not surprise.<p>1: Revert.io backs up Evernote.
2: Scrivener and Dropbox work well (but sync badly) for managing a lot of text and screenshots. It's also a great writing platform.
3: glui is my current screenshot app - it provides Dropbox links to each picture.
My main question is why Evernote doesn't allow you to pay for a premium service where snapshots of all your data is backed up off-site in a way where you can restore from it.<p>Every company that handles stuff that customers absolutely cannot afford to lose (like photos) should consider offering a premium service where data-loss is 100% not possible, even through an act of god.
I stopped using Evernote two years ago but before that I was a paying customer for several years. I used to export my notes as HTML and burn them to a backup DVD-R.<p>BTW, I stopped using Evernote because I spent a lot of time curating notes and very little time ever referring to them. I switched to a simple text note system.
To me, the core problem here is that evernote's cloud synced notes are stored locally in some very proprietary cache.<p>I'm happy to use Evernote and assume that it will fail in some horrible way. When it does, I want to be able to easily get my notes back via file system backups or backblaze restore.
I recently had a very similar experience with several notes not syncing up to the cloud service, despite hitting sync multiple times. Fortunately they're not important data however it did highlight to me that there are certainly complications in solving this problem.<p>It also got me thinking about the challenges involved here - both with UI and with trust. If I as a user don't trust that the sync button does what it says on the tin then how does a product regain that trust and what can the UI do to show that it's actually done its job?
I would wager that the note belongs to a local (unsynched) notebook, which is why it wasn't on Evernote's servers. I apologize if this explanation is a bit long, buckle in.<p>Specifically I suspect the note belongs to a "Conflicting Changes" notebook, which gets automatically created a note you are trying to upsync conflicts with a copy already on the server. There might be other sync errors that trigger this as well.<p>If you look at the screenshot of the Mac app, the note belongs to a notebook that starts with "Con..." rather than something like "cherian's notebook" as seen in the screenshot from the Web app.<p>Users who run into this get a sync error and a modal dialog explaining that their copy of the note is placed into a local notebook titled, "Conflicting Changes [Date/timestamp]" There should be another copy of the note on the Evernote servers. It is possible that when Cherian saw this, he deleted the copy of the note on the Evernote servers and kept the local copy, which would be the opposite of what he'd want to do. (Total guess)<p>I would guess that this happened very early on and Cherian has been adding & editing this note locally in that local notebook, but not realizing it. The dialog can be a little confusing, and many of us just click away modal dialogs without thinking about it too much.<p>If you primarily ever work out of All Notes, you may not pay much attention to which notebooks your notes are in. Especially if you only edit that one note on the desktop. If you worked between desktop and mobile and/or web it would be easy to immediately notice that note missing entirely.<p>It is possible that there wasn't anything wrong with the note as the customer support agent said, but rather the note was just in a local notebook. Copy/pasting it into a new note would solve it in either case.<p>Local Notebooks exist only for the desktop clients. You can create one to put in notes you don't want sync'd up to the Evernote service. They're also a place to store notes if you're out of this month's quota.<p>Source: Customer Support agents escalate up to specialists, which eventually escalates up to Product Management. Almost exclusively with really weird and hairy problems.
Small plug, but <a href="http://revert.io" rel="nofollow">http://revert.io</a> is pretty great for backing up your cloud things, with excellent Evernote support.
There are tools to regularly, automatically backup your Evernote notes -<p>Evernote Exporter for Windows, for example
(<a href="http://lifehacker.com/5845885/evernote-exporter-schedules-note-exports" rel="nofollow">http://lifehacker.com/5845885/evernote-exporter-schedules-no...</a>)
I have been using Keynote [1] for years, without ever losing information. I find that its tree data structure is extremely useful. It is an open-source desktop program. Unfortunately its development seems to have been put on hold. It would be great if developers would keep it updated (on Windows 8, there are some small UX glitches).<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynote_(notetaking_software)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynote_(notetaking_software)</a>
So is the Evernote local content DB not included in Time Machine backups? My understanding is that it typically is, although it takes a little doing to restore.<p>I tend to put important stuff in DropBox because, as a collection of local folders and files, it is well-integrated with Time Machine.<p>Important reminder that NEITHER Evernote nor DropBox are backup solutions. They should be; they're a good approximation; but ultimately the only reliable way to back something up is to put a copy of it somewhere else.
Does evernote have a command line api tool, like s3cmd and gsutil ?<p>We built s3cmd into our environment a year or two ago[1] and gsutil is running in beta right now ... we'd be happy to build in an evernote tool so you could sync evernote to your rsync.net account ...<p>[1] <a href="http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html</a> (scroll down to "Data Transfer to/from Amazon S3")
My solution is pretty low tech. I keep a spiral bound notebook by my desk for notes. When it fills up, I run it through the scanner, copy to backups, and buy a new notebook.
Evernote has lost important PDFs I've attached to notes multiple times.<p>Some would show up on my PC but be missing from my Mac and vice versa. If a note has many PDFs (10+) it's almost guaranteed to miss some on either of the two machines. I gave up on the idea of organizing books of receipts, taxes, etc. in Evernote, I just cannot trust it for anything more important than a grocery list.
I only lost my data once but that was enough. My note got stuck in a sync conflict.<p>Support was unwilling to help me get the data out of the transmit queue... they actually told me to make sure to save my note before moving to another device. I guess I was the first user to forget that. They never apologized for their bug and I was a paid user back then.
I've encountered bizarre sync/data loss issues with Evernote before, but thankfully with nothing that I cared about. Because I learned that I couldn't trust Evernote, I don't actually use it for very much. This blog post reminded me that I should go cancel my annual subscription.
I feel <a href="http://yipgo.com" rel="nofollow">http://yipgo.com</a> might be a good jump-off point for something oriented to more of a power user. It lacks thinks like Dropbox/Drive/etc sync, but there's promise...
If you are storing important info in <only one place>, think twice.<p>This could have (and sometimes, has) happened with any single service/storage/whatever-cloud provider, <i>even yourself on your computer</i>.
Keep all important data with you, both in your PC (better encrypted) and in an external disk (backup).
If you are really paranoid, you may backup it in the cloud too, S3, Dropbox or any other service.
off the topic a bit, I feel evernote is far too much business-stretched nowadays. For the past two years, almost all new features and improvement are cater to business users, like presentation, work chat and context.<p>Evernote premium actually has note versions, but the experience is pretty horrible. Unlike dropbox, you cannot revert to an early version freely since it is the server deciding the time to backup your note state.<p>Revert.io seems to be great. I have signed up. It will be better that they can offer limited revisions (2-3) for free users.
SimpleNote - I started using it because it's lightweight. It lacks s lot of features of Evernote, but it seems to work after 1year plus of heavy use. Feel your pain.
Linux users can back up their Evernotes using <a href="http://nevernote.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://nevernote.sourceforge.net/</a>
I have some concerns about the tone of this article. First, no software is "bulletproof" - failures happen. Second, making one note with all your important life information creates a single point of failure. This is a bad idea. Third, Evernote came to the rescue with their tech support guys and actually recovered this document! Seems like they provide a valuable service.