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RadicalDad

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  1. Just curious who is the troll here - the people complaining or the Evernote "experts" who are defending the indefensible? I've just lost notes also. Full notes, the tail end of notes I added a few days ago, and even "restored" notes. They will be there for a moment and then they disappear. As for creating a support ticket, that is a complete joke. I've already got two support tickets going. There hasn't been so much as an acknowledgement in weeks. The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. Evernote hasn't responded to earlier tech support requests. Why would I think they would respond to yet another request?
  2. Doesn't work for me either. Same problem - the YouTube clip window is simply blank. Does Evernote ever fix anything?
  3. I’m afraid jbenson2 has it right. I don’t like being a curmudgeon, but there is a ton of incorrect information and bad advice being promulgated in this thread, much of it from people listed as “guru.” One would think they should know better. First and foremost, I consider all solutions that sync across the Internet to be vulnerable in today’s climate. This includes public cloud and private cloud backup systems. One popular brand’s NAS was hit particularly hard with ransomware a few years ago, though generally I regard public clouds to be more vulnerable because they are targets. Evernote is certainly a public cloud, and thus it is vulnerable. For those who think this isn’t an issue that needs protection, well, good luck to you. The truth is, hacking and ransomware are currently more of a threat than either disk failure (assuming you replace your disks on a reasonable schedule) or data destruction by fire or physical theft of the data media. The rest of you with common sense should read on. Evernote is unlikely to be hacked. WRONG. A quick Google search reveals that major Evernote hack attempts have occurred at least twice, March 2013 and February 2015. (There may be others, I just looked at the first page of results.) One of those times the hack was successful in that accounts were actually breached. Let’s be clear that for at least these two cases, Evernote was not at fault – passwords were stolen from elsewhere and then tried on Evernote accounts to see if they would work. Evernote acted quickly and responsibly in both cases – kudos to them. Still, the danger exists. And Evernote still doesn’t provide a good way to back up offline – see below. Time Machine (on a Mac) and other backups that keep previous versions are adequate. MAYBE. These will work (sort of) only if a version is kept that predates the hacking. Consider this scenario: you start Evernote in the morning, don’t look at it again until evening, you get hacked with ransomware at 10 AM but don’t notice it until 5 PM. You have a versioned backup system that takes snapshots once an hour (as does JMichaelTX), but it only keeps 5 previous versions. In this case, you are screwed. Whatever the attack vector (via your local machine or via Evernote servers), both the local version and the server version of your notes have been corrupted via Evernote sync, as has your backup of the local copy. That fact seems to be lost on too many “experts” here. Backups of EXB and/or ENEX files are interchangeable. WRONG. First, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, backup of only the EXB file isn’t adequate. One needs to back up the entire folder (both PC and Mac). The EXB folder backup doesn’t do a lot of good, though. If an uncorrupted copy of the EXB folder is restored, it will be overwritten by the (corrupted) notes on the server. Again, as noted elsewhere in this thread, one CANNOT use the EXB folder backup as the basis for loading notes to a new account. The only solution is a manual export to an ENEX file, and then a manual re-import of the ENEX notes, which the server will see as “new” or “updated.” Evernote currently provides an adequate (offline) backup solution for this problem. WRONG. Despite the fact that they have been hacked at least twice, Evernote still has their heads up their butts. If you are a power user, the ENEX solution is not adequate. I have over 100 notebooks. Others use the link function extensively. Neither of these structures are preserved by the ENEX export. Manual export of 100 separate notebooks on a regular basis to provide a backup solution is not feasible. Users of the link function are simply screwed altogether. Thus Evernote does not provide an adequate backup solution. EVERNOTE, YOU NEED TO FIX THIS! Will they? Given their (lack of) response to their own buggy software, I doubt it.
  4. Agreed, small price to pay for an unlikely occurrence. Then again, disk corruption, fire, and other data destroyers are also unlikely occurrences (assuming one is smart enough to buy a new hard drive before the old one inevitably dies). In 40 years of doing this kind of work, I've had to use client backups only twice (not counting moving data to new equipment as part of an equipment refresh.) In truth, before the age of automated online backups and cheap SOHO or department level NAS backups, week-old backup data was normal for all but the most critical functions such as financial transactions. Now we complain if it is more than a day old. That is the 64,000 bit question. It seems this is a giant PITA the way Evernote works now. You can't just restore an Evernote local data backup. If you use the same account, the server will overwrite the backup data. I proposed restoring to a new account, but no one seems to know if that will work. The offline export-import scenario that Evernote suggests as the solution is quite time consuming, prone to error, and is not really a full backup as notebook structure and link data is lost in the process.
  5. I think we all use the Evernote server to set up a new machine or "restore" an existing database. My concern is what happens if the Evernote server becomes corrupted. What if some bit of ransomware manages to figure out, either by infecting your computer or by direct attack on the Evernote server, how to encrypt all your notes? Let's say the bad guys manage to encrypt your notes locally via the Evernote API and then those notes sync to the server. How can one recover without paying the ransom? The current defense against ransomware is to have offline backups which they can't touch. Yes, that is damn inconvenient - feels like I'm stepping backward in time to carrying around data tapes (yep, I'm that old). The question being posed is how to restore Evernote data from an offline backup. So far, I'm not seeing a good answer. I didn't know that feature existed. Thanks for the tip. Good for individual notes, but rather tedious for an entire database.
  6. Your method involves significant ongoing manual labor to remain prepared for a disaster that may never happen. I much prefer automated backups which require no ongoing labor or mindshare. (You obviously don't deal with users - it's just about axiomatic that manual backup procedures fail to be executed regularly, resulting in inadequate protection.) Should disaster strike, the extra steps that I will need to take are minor in comparison to the significant wasted effort that your method entails. And, umm, BTW, it turns out that the method I proposed is suggested by Evernote themselves. See this link, which I found after getting keyword search suggestions from answers here (thanks everyone). For those lurkers who are wondering, since it has yet to be explained in this thread, there is no way of "importing" the saved data folder. Essentially what you do is to set up a new copy of Evernote (or use your existing install) and overwrite the data folder with the backup copy. See the link I cited for full details. (Another BTW - it appears one needs to preserve the whole data folder, not just the EXB file. That is what their instructions say. I have no idea what is in it, but I have a snippets file in that folder that is fairly large. One assumes Evernote doesn't keep data around for no reason.) The fact that the export process does not preserve the notebook structure is just pure laziness on Evernote's part. Same goes for the failure to preserve links, a feature I don't currently use but apparently many others find invaluable. But it is what I've come to expect of Evernote. Sigh. I get that providing a method to selectively override their sync logic might be really difficult for Evernote, but the failure to provide for disaster recovery is yet another reason why I long ago stopped recommending Evernote for mission critical tasks. One of these days I'll get over my own laziness and move our people to a more suitable platform. But for now, there may be a way around this issue. Has anyone asked support whether you create a brand new account in conjunction with a backed-up data folder? Then the problem with server side corrupted notes would go away. I note the data folder has a .accounts file. I wonder if deleting it or modifying it would do the trick. jbenson2, if your support ticket is still open, could you ask about this?
  7. Thanks for the responses, but it still isn't clear what, if anything, can be done with a clean copy of my local Evernote files. If need be, one can get around the sync problem by disconnecting from the Internet, if only temporarily. One could load the saved clean copy, export the notes, connect to the Internet, delete the account, then import the previously exported notes. Saves the hassle of manually exporting the notes every few weeks for backup purposes. Just include the Evernote files in your automated backup procedure and you are good to go. What neither of you have said is how one goes about actually using the saved clean copy of the Evernote files. Is that possible? As for note export, I didn't know about that feature before. Not sure what "links" are not preserved by export to an .enex file and re-import therefrom. Since I'm not using these "links" I'm not sure the issue would affect me. I would be more worried about my folder structure - is that preserved by an export and re-import from the top level folder? As for offsite backup, we already do that. Our current strategy is daily backup to a local NAS, and from there the NAS backs up the cloud. That takes care of the typical problem (computer or hard drive failure) and the not-so-typical problem (theft or local catastrophic physical loss of both computer and backup medium by fire, etc.). We are now evaluating weekly offline backups to handle the hacker and ransomware problem. Anything web connected is suspect, which is how I got to thinking about Evernote. Again, my question remains. What, if anything, can be done with the local Evernote files? How would I get a fresh install of the Evernote client to actually use those files?
  8. We are in the process of hardening our backup systems against emerging threats, one of which is ransomware. The problem with ransomware is that many backup systems will see a ransomware encryption of a file as a legitimate change to the file, and will happily back up the (now unusable) file, overwriting the good copy. I am not sure if anything like that can happen to Evernote, but I would hate to have a ransomware attack encrypt my notes, then have those encrypted notes sync to the Evernote servers. In both Windows and OSX there is a local copy of the Evernote files. Will making an offline backup of these files (thereby protecting them from ransomware threats) be useful? Specifically, if my online account were compromised, would a clean copy of the local files do me any good? How would I get Evernote to use the local copy instead of the corrupted online copy?
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