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Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

jasonkincaid.net

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Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#221

Post by dunham »

Alex3917 wrote: post #148

If you store data in a format that's not future proof, using software that's not open source, then you don't really get to complain when your data disappears. Especially if you're not storing the files locally and making regular backups.

FWIW, on OSX Evernote stores everything locally in a future-proof format.

They use a directory tree, with one directory per note. Each note has HTML file, all supporting files, an "enml" version of the HTML file (i.e. a HTML-like XML document), and XML documents containing character recognition data.

The local indexes are in lucene format. (Specifically clucene.)

You will also find a sqlite3 database with additional metadata.

If you store anything you care about in Evernote, I'd highly recommend backing this up. On OSX it will be in within one of these two directories, depending on which version you're running:

    ~/Library/Application Support/Evernote
or

     ~/Library/Containers/com.evernote.Evernote/Data/Library/Application Support/Evernote

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#222

Post by phaed »

sheetjs wrote: post #38
phaed wrote: post #32

Shit, here I am finally taking the time to see what Evernote is and finding that I could find use for it in my day to day. Yet now there is no way I could ever trust it with my data, everything I would put on it is important to me. What are some good Evernote alternatives?

I like Simplenote ( http://simplenote.com/ )

Funny, they support all the platforms but the most used platform around which also happens to be thee one I am looking for. Windows.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#223

Post by erichocean »

What's ridiculous are sync services without history. Just blowing away data blindly and hoping for the best is beyond stupid.

Sadly, both Evernote and iCloud follow this "strategy". If you've never experience the joy of watching iCloud blow away every contact in your address book during a sync, consider yourself lucky.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#225

Post by victorhooi »

I use Evernote as well, mostly for researching o the internet.

However, I've found their Chrome Web Clipper to be remarkably bug-ridden and unreliable.

It's very annoying - as you can queue up a list of pages to clip, and you don't know if it's going to actually clip all of them. So you have to wait, and make sure each one is clipped.

See here for other people's reports on it as well:

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/43399-clipper-hangs-on-...

If I knew of an cross-platform alternative, I'd seriously look into it.

Any good alternatives for web clipping or research?

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#226

Post by mbrutsch »

niels_olson wrote: post #212
dlu wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello! Evernote employee here, I first wanted to say thanks for posting. Its always good to hear from our users directly. I've been at Evernote for a while and it is still weird to see us show up on HN. Anyways, I enjoyed your comments wanted to give my personal opinion & point of view for at least points 1 & 2. 1. You're right that scaling is very hard. If you want a closer look at it, we have a tech blog that even…

> third party applications that can convert from HTML into a number of other formats, so we're relying on that You should fix that. Skip RTF, DOC, whatever. Just plain text is fine. Everything else can handle it. The world needs to wake up and realize plain text is the alpha and the omega of language. Do that right first and make sure it's the last thing to fail.

It's much easier to go from html2txt than the opposite.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#227

Post by pauljohncleary »

bdwalter wrote: post #84

I have been a loyal Evernote premium payer since 2009, and using it even longer. For a long time I recommended it to friends but since have stopped. I have developed some concerns with it over the years. 1. Fear of data loss... it's probably the largest part of my mistrust of all these dang cloud services that want to control/own me or otherwise lock me into their service. I run a 99.999% uptime, extreme scale, SaaS…

Take a look at https://tent.io for a potential future solution to points 1, 2 and 3

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#228

Post by benrapscallion »

AVTizzle wrote: post #44

I think this is a direct consequence of how thinly they're spreading themselves out across multiple platforms. They have a native app for every mobile and computer platform, along with web, plugins for every major browser, and then the other apps - skitch, penultimate, clearly, hello, etc... It truly is in the face of the "do one thing and do it well" mindset that many other companies subscribe to. It's a shame too,…

And the shop selling wallets and backpacks.

Re: Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant

#229

Post by michaelcullina »

I use OneNote on my Nokia 925 Windows Phone, my Surface Pro, my laptop, and my workstation. All the data is synced in SkyDrive. I've got a lot of data. Global search is instantaneous. The application is extremely reliable. I save cut and paste snippets from the web. Stack Overflow answers with my personal annotations; anything. Images and sound files are extremely easy. I can record a meeting and take a few notes (by typing or using the stylus on the Surface) and later I can search on the string to find the note. If that note was taken 40 minutes into a 60 minute meeting I can click and get the .wav file to play that bit of the meeting. You can use OneNote on the other platforms as described in this article.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043415

I'm not shilling for the Redmond entity but I always do find it hilarious that a very superior software product can hide in plain view and all the "think different" people can't even see it.

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