I am a premium member and I stopped using Evernote when I understood how their versioning works! Seriously, they should rename it to regular backups at 8hr intervals.
Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
301–310 of 459 posts
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#302the only thing that keeps me using evernote is the ability to forward emails to it and then merge similar ones.
If something else did that I would swap in a heart beat and for my other notes I'd convert them to google docs.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft has OneNote, which might be a good cautionary tale in this area. OneNote was once the king of note taking, like back in 2003, and it's still a great product. But Microsoft focused too much on the Business market, I think, dropping OneNote from the Office Home packages, and that kind of killed it outside of the corp world.
I love what OneNote can do, the ability to record meeting video or capture a whiteboard talk with a smart board is magical. But I can't use it day to day. Managing notebooks, tabs and pages is a real pain. I end up with a sprawling OneNote notebook that gets lost in the sprawl of OneDrive/SharePoint.
same here, ive been using it for two years now and it so tedious to organise stuff on the metro app that i just dont bother, so everything is a mess atm
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#304In the last 5 years I've accumulated some 8 000 notes in Evernote, which I would love to move to a safer platform/format in light of recent evidence of data loss and speculation concerning Evernote's longevity. What are the alternatives to organizing this second brain/memory? 50% are 20% complete webpages or complete articles deemed important enough to save a copy for later 10% graphics, annotated images and PDFs 10%…
While I think OneNote is a superior product to Evernote, its organization abilities leaves much to be desired. For instance once you get more than like 10-15 (depending on resolution) pages within a second you now have to scroll and its a tiny list. More than, say, 2 sections on mobile means horizontal scrolling. It's all awkward and cumbersome. But I have yet to find another product that is better than Evernote and…
Ah whereas I find organisation in Evernote not to work. The tagging feature (on Windows at least) is buggy, and I often end up with half-word tags; they can also be 'lost' before the note syncs. I have notebooks full of disorganised information which I can't find -- this is what I view as Evernote's biggest weakness.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#305I've founded a startup that wants to tackle the digital notebook and save-for-later problem, for any content - not just web stuff. What's your wish list for your ideal notebook?
I like something that I can buy and host myself so that when the over-valued company decides to stop making it I can still use it. Then again, I'm probably not a target user base for somebody looking for the next big thing.
I thought many times about building this kind of self-hosting note taking app, but what's stopping me is that it's not very useful without all the mobile and desktop clients, and that's very hard to develop. That's probably the reason why there's currently no good open source solution for this.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I fully agree, but as a vendor that only implements bring-your-own-storage, I can tell you it's not much fun from the supplier standpoint. Our no 1 support request is something along the lines of: "I've deleted my diagram, can you restore it for me?" "No. We don't store your data, we never even see it" "What a useless service, just get my data back or I want to speak to random escalation person " 99% of users don't c…
(Disclaimer: I work at Google, not speaking for the company, etc)
We can do both. Google stores, backs up, secures, and generally ensures your data is safe, and you can click a button to download it all if you think you can do any of that better.
This is probably too hard to ask every company to do the same, as it would exclude smaller companies who don't have the resources (this takes a lot of time and development!). So it makes sense for them to offer a different feature set, and accept that it's not going to be suitable for some people.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 f…
I made the switch to Simplenote, and I've had a great experience so far. The main "sacrifice" is that you can only store plain next. It was created by Automattic, Matt Mullenweg's company.
Another vote for Simplenote - does exactly what it says on the tin. In 2-3 years of using it, I had only couple of issues with sync. When I reported them, support was super responsive and the issues were fixed with subsequent updates.
They also offer easy exports of your notes.
If you've never tried, give it a shot - http://simplenote.com
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#308In the last 5 years I've accumulated some 8 000 notes in Evernote, which I would love to move to a safer platform/format in light of recent evidence of data loss and speculation concerning Evernote's longevity. What are the alternatives to organizing this second brain/memory? 50% are 20% complete webpages or complete articles deemed important enough to save a copy for later 10% graphics, annotated images and PDFs 10%…
So this is not at all the cheapest option, but if you have a Synology NAS (which are just absolutely fantastic, imho), you can use Note Station. It's very much like Evernote in terms of design and capabilities (though still young), and it has a very straight-forward importer for Evernote notes. I use it as a backup for Evernote. Note Station has mobile apps and web clipper extensions for the browser as well. Since th…
Note Station isnt half bad at all, and has a very similar layout (almost exactly like evernote!) so its easily to pick up. has a web clipper.
its a bit slow at times though but so is the web version of evernote as well. not that they ever will, but if synology ever made a desktop note station app id be sold.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
That might just mean that they delete all backups when the account gets deleted for privacy reasons.
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?
At least in the EU there is a regulatory obligation to design your backup system such that data can (eventually) be deleted if the user so requests.
Fortunately there is no strict time limit on completing this process so a design that looks like "and after X months it will have aged out of our backups" appears to be considered reasonable. You are still responsible for making sure your backups are safely destroyed.
Re: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
#310...and then there came OneNote and syncing was even better, features even more, collaboration best, and it was free and I started using it and soon after I never accessed Evernote again. And many, formerly hot loving Evernote fans in my peer group changed, too.