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(Archived) Evernote Purgatory and Type-Ahead Index on the MAC


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Purgatory

I wonder if anyone knows what "purgatory" in my Evernote files means. It is nearly 4GB on my tiny MBA local drive (my actual content is only about 700 MB), and it appears to hold about 2,500 folders of notes that I have deleted. I believe my notes may have died in a state of grace when I pressed the delete button, but I wonder if, or when, they will experience sufficient purification of their .enml souls to move on into the Trash. If I help them along by deleting the folder, will it adversely impact the app? 

 

Type-Ahead Index

The Type-Ahead Index takes up 4GB on my tiny MBA drive as well. Yes, assuming Get Info is in the ball park, my less than 1 GB of actual content is currently squatting on nearly 10% of my available disk space (you get about 99 GB of user space in a 128 GB drive). I started to run out today and I was wondering what in the world I could delete.

 

My question: does anyone know what will happen if we delete the index? I assume it will just re-populate the data, and I will be back to square one, but only after many hours of processing. That's no good. Ideally, I'd like to get rid of the type-ahead index entirely (I assume this is for type-ahead search suggestions, which I would gladly sacrifice, because it is not a feature that appeals to me), but if that is not possible, sending off the purgatory folks to their final resting place, and deleting the type-ahead index together ought to significantly reduce the space occupied by Evernote on my drive, right? Anyone with experience, please let me know. Otherwise, I'll just give it a go (I have backups, of course).

 

Diagnostic Tools

@ Evernote developers: It would be really nice to have diagnostic tools in the interface that enable us to manage our account (toggle on/off features like the creation of snippet view images, type-ahead search indexes, purgatory, etc.) and trim off the fat from within the interface instead of mucking around in the library. I'd prefer not to have to think about all of this stuff, flip a few switches, and let the app run in some kind of eco mode with a small footprint on my local drive.

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Give this a try: move the directory in question to a "new" temporary directory. Restart the computer and then restart Evernote and see if creates the needed directory and information. If not, and EN will not run, just move the saved directory with information back. You should just be back with the original problem!! 

I hope this will work for you.

David

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  • Level 5*

Give this a try: move the directory in question to a "new" temporary directory. Restart the computer and then restart Evernote and see if creates the needed directory and information. If not, and EN will not run, just move the saved directory with information back. You should just be back with the original problem!! 

I hope this will work for you.

David

 

Thanks!

 

I am sure that it will run fine if I clear everything out, but the problem is that I will have to spend quite a while downloading and processing everything. The last time I did a fresh install it took over 9 hours to complete. I'm not terribly keen on losing another day of work. My hope is that I can just delete the two files together, and whatever processing the typeahead index needs will be relatively short. Ideally, though, I don't want the typeahead at all. If there is a hack to block that, I'd like to know :)

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OK. No suggestions from anyone, so I just went ahead and deleted the folders. It wasn't any big deal after all. 

 

Purgatory=0

Type-Ahead Index=32.6 MB

 

The account "migrated notes from a previous version" (there isn't one that I am aware of on this computer) and processed everything within 20 minutes. If you find yourself running out of space on your Mac, then I'd say these two folders might be worth a look. As always, before you go mucking around in your account, make sure you have backups! I've got about 10 more gigabytes worth of space on my computer now. 

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GM,

Do you notice an improvement in speed - opening a large note, or searching?

You would think that a MB index is going to be a lot faster than a GB one. It does seem a little faster to me on basic searches, but the beta overall is working a little better (it seems to have solved some of the stranger search behaviors), so it is difficult to tell for sure if I sped things up. I wish I had some numbers to compare. I'll work with it all day tomorrow and that will tell me a lot more. I'll probably report in the public beta thread about that.

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I still think there's something strange with your account :)

 

I've got about 5gb of data in mine. Type ahead index is 10mb, purgatory is under 200kb.

 

How you got to 4gb for each I have no idea????? Maybe we do need to consult the gods?

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I still think there's something strange with your account :)

 

I've got about 5gb of data in mine. Type ahead index is 10mb, purgatory is under 200kb.

 

How you got to 4gb for each I have no idea????? Maybe we do need to consult the gods?

 

The "something strange with your account" might be me!

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/40539-one-way-to-ko-your-evernote-account/

 

The problem, I think, is partly that I have a lot of "churn" in my account, with notes going in and out. In fact, I have probably deleted all of the notes in my account (and added them back in different ways) a dozen times or more this year trying to figure out why the iOS app won't work for me. I have done several fresh installs of Evernote on my Mac as well trying to figure out why I am running into problems that no one else seems to be reporting. It is entirely possible that I simply haven't done a fresh install since the last purge of notes.

 

My thinking is that the app "should" be using some Evernote version of TRIM to keep things running smoothly, and I would really like to see users gain a bit more control over the diagnostics data, because right now I don't feel like I have many tools at my disposal beyond annihilation of data. I know it is unlikely to happen, but it doesn't hurt to ask!

 

At any rate, I am sure there are others out there hitting storage limits on their desktops. These two folders are good candidate for deletion to clear out some of the clutter.

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GM,

Do you notice an improvement in speed - opening a large note, or searching?

 

A few searches took a while to complete (a couple of seconds), but nothing as bad as I have seen in the past. I only have a small fraction of my notes in Evernote at the moment, though. I'll add in a few thousand later today and see what happens. 

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GM,

Do you notice an improvement in speed - opening a large note, or searching?

 

Well, things aren't going smoothly at the moment. I added about a thousand of my notes back into my account today (I have several tens of thousands to add eventually, but for various reasons, I have been keeping them out of the account). The total account size in the "content" folder is only about 700 mb (that sounds about right), but the note index is now 1.4 GB (double the actual content?) and the type ahead index is about 700 mb, so things are ballooning back there. One thing that probably puts me into the corner case category is the fact that all of this (with the exception of a handful of notes) is entirely text, so that is a lot of data to index. 

 

Search

Unfortunately, it took several seconds to complete a search just now when I typed "intitle" into the search, because the app tried to search for "intitle" in all of my notes with the incremental search. Obviously, I wasn't done typing in the search, and I could have saved it the effort if it would have waited. 

 

Opening large notes

It varies. There is usually a lag of about a second, but sometimes several seconds with the pinwheel (the Mac version of the Windows spinning disk). 

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