10gallonhat

when did this new free plan take effect?

I find it useful to hear different use cases and solutions. After reading about some of yours, I realize that I really was my own worst enemy. I was mixing too many types of things in a single note (text AND docs AND links AND a table, then going and altering them again later, etc), as if the note was a big container. It would have been better to have the text note and link to each additional note that contained some doc(s). My personal EN has mostly phone originated content, so short entries and not very mixed. If If do migrate that one, it will undoubtedly be an easier task. I suspect v10 wouldn't be too bad there. You also point out something a lot of people underutilize: templates. I had some EN templates that were okay. They didn't fit my use cases very well. Now I have several well thought out ones in Obsidian, with preset tags, that make weekly notes, task handling, email or web capture, an a number of other things easier and cleaner for me. That's a definite possibility. Links don't always behave as expected. I should have said one folder doesn't work because I have so many that don't have human readable titles (about 1500+ per year for over 10 years). I should have been renaming them, but didn't because I was being lazy and auto-emailing them into EN, which allowed me to just link them in various TOC notes. Unfortunately, the email subject lines could be REALLY long and got many links got truncated at export. Currently, I'm renaming each manually, but I have to sign them now, so I'm touching them anyway.

That's the thing. Some of my data is a record, which would have been great as html (and not lazy at all), some is notes that I sometimes amend and some is what I consider live docs. Those are things like SOPs, which get updated periodically. I also have to keep historical versions of those (something EN excels at). Changing to a different platform may require considering not only how much data you have, but what type and how you use it. Using EN let me not think about the differences, but that's not necessarily a good thing. True. I had too many folders, which broke a bunch of my interlinking, even in html. Now I have one per year. I have to use/share data on a rolling 12-18 month schedule, so yes, that would still break things if I exported years separately, but it's far better. I have so many docs each year that putting it all in one folder doesn't work. Thus far if I click on an EN link in one of the HTML files the note in 6.25 EN desktop opens. My links in the html export worked (unless they were in a different year or got truncated, which some did). I think some of my links were from back in the period (8 years ago?) when EN randomly changed their link handling, then changed it back a couple months later. There are, but it's difficult to figure out what the best way is for you. Personally, I don't like my data to be in a proprietary format. If you're locked in, then any swap becomes painful. The more input methods, file types, internal links, time and size you have into any program complicates things. Having some sort of use case and basic structure in mind is helpful (even on EN). If EN had stuck to the 625.1 path I wouldn't have left. It's easy to use for multiple input methods and in terms of search-ability. There is info all over the forums about other options. It can be tough to find and a lot of it is probably outdated at this point. I'm a little dubious about starting that thread. I feel like it's a bit unfair to the forum, which is about USING EN. But, if you feel like it would be a useful topic on it's own, go for it. I don't know that the PTB (Powers That Be) at EN would delete it or anything, but that would be their prerogative.

You're right about the tags and source links being pretty searchable as, but I often need to go back and amend notes. An HTML export is more of a fixed record. Maybe there's a way to use that export I didn't consider. I might work for my personal account, which is much simpler. My poor practices also included notes with duplicate titles (ditto attachment titles), I constantly alternated between one note per thought, and many thoughts in one note with lots of tags linking to notes in many folders, and a too complicated folder structure. I was my own worst enemy. 😃 Not only did I ***** myself by linking to titles with characters that need to be escaped, but many of my EN alias links broke or started pointing to EN in the browser. There may have been a script for that, but at some point I just had to go for it and switch. I feel like my workflow is pretty solid now. Giving myself a little bit of structure helped. I really only need to use Obsidian, GDrive and my NAS (also has a cloud backup), but I have options. I have a play Vault that syncs to DropBox via Dropsync. Forgot to say that I'm using the GDrive scan where I used to use the EN android doc capture. The former works pretty nicely, where the latter honestly did shine. I'll check out BoxCrypter. Thanks for that tip.

Sounds like @CalS and some others here have reached the same point I did in Sept 2021. I briefly mentioned what I'm using earlier in this thread, but let me give some details on the conversion, in case it's useful for anyone else. I'm now into month 6 and am quite happy with my choice. I was a 12+ year EN user on Win and Android with ~15GB of data (22.5k notes) I found EN v10 to be an entirely different program (not functional for me) and used Legacy as long as I could My files are pretty heavy on PDFs, spreadsheets and Rocketbook scans I chose Obsidian, which reads Markdown files in a system file structure. Any folder can be opened in Obsidian. Obsidian has a free (personal) and paid (business) options. Integrated Sync is a paid add-on or you can use a free option. Publish is a paid add-on. All the paid things are very reasonable. You own your data. You are not locked into a proprietary file format. You can open your files in any program that reads MD, at any time. I've been playing with Typora for prettier print formatting. MD is simple markup and there is a live preview editor. A lot of my PDFs and images went into my GDrive separately (more info below) STEP 1 - I installed Obsidian and tweaked the UI, added themes and functionality (for calendars, tasks, templates, note refactoring, backlinks, etc.) via the Plugins. I'm still tweaking, but I like to tinker. STEP 2 - The conversion was a good time to review and actually consider structure. My EN account had grown organically, so it was a hot mess. I had 12 years of poor practices to deal with: I updated tags, rearranged folders, and renamed a TON of files that had characters MD disallows ("/" in a title, for example, will break links), as well as some internal EN links. I had thousands of auto-titled PDFs that I couldn't identify without opening, but didn't touch (they were handled pretty smoothly by the conversion). I spent 3 weeks tinkering. YMMV and will probably take far less time. STEP 3 - Export each notebook to .enex (this gave me separate folders, which act as functionally independent Obsidian Vaults - that was a decision, not a requirement). I converted only 2 years of notes + some evergreen ones. All my old data continues to live in my EN account, on a Basic plan. I now return to it once every week or two, when I realize I missed an evergreen note in the transfer. It's close to being an archive now. Earlier I tried exporting to .html and can see how that could be a useful archive. Unfortunately, my poor practices, noted above, made this method not viable for me. STEP 4 - Converted the .enex files via the YARLE tool, which allowed me to bulk convert how tags are handled, how internal links work, how attachments are stored, add custom meta data, etc. Pretty easy. Steps 3 - 4 can take a couple minutes to half an hour+, depending on your file size. Created and Modified date stamps are preserved. That was important for me. STEP 5 - Opened each converted folder in Obsidian. Got to work! (Optional) STEP 6 - Set up synching to my GDrive (there are several options) In an attempt to keep my main Vault a little more lean, I keep a category of attachments in a separate GDrive folder . Those files may be deleted in 2 years anyway. I'm able to create links in Obsidian to GDrive attachment folders or individual files. Additionally, I'm finding it easier to share that data with others via GDrive than with EN. I have more than one Obsidian vault, some live on my C drive, others on the network. I have them all backed up to the NAS. (Optional) STEP 7 - Installed Obsidian for mobile, set up sync with one of the options and opened my Vault. Got to work. The biggest changes for me were rethinking how to structure things, which improved retrieval, attachment handling, sharing and syncing. Obsidian works for a lot of different structure options. You can search the community forum for Knowledge Management - Zettelkasten, IMF, PARA, evergreen notes, etc. The only things Obsidian doesn't do is OCR inside of PDFs or allow you to set up auto capture via email rules. The forums have suggestions for academic PDF attribution programs that may be useful. This hasn't been an issue for me so far, but I might need to explore it later. I figured out how to work around auto inclusion via email, which has slimmed down my files. Of course there are other differences. I haven't explored voice notes, since I never use them. Obsidian is a far more flexible tool than EN. I loved the flexibility of EN before v10, but now realize I was actually fitting my workflow to the tool, rather than adjusting the tool to my work flow, as I'm doing now with Obsidian. Last thing - I also have a personal EN account, which I'm still using. The android app really only works for capture at this point. I've restructured it to convert, but haven't done so yet.

One of the first things I set up when I started using EN 11 years ago was scanning with auto-filing. Now that I'm off EN I miss this feature. Here's what I did. Keep in mind that this doesn't work with the free version of EN and I'm scanning on a business class machine: I set up my scanner to scan to my EN email address. I'd pop the item in the feeder, pressed two buttons, and bam! the scan would appear in the Unsorted folder for me to file more specifically.

It does the trick so far. I do miss some EN features though (fabulous doc capture and auto-filing). Personally, I'd define Power Users as high volume and/or long time users. I just don't thing EN considered how a sudden switch to their new architecture would work out for lots of notes and/or lots of attachments. If they did consider such things, they decided those users weren't enough of their business to cater to specifically. I'm sure many, many new users will be very happy with v10. Honestly, I probably would be if I started a new account and abandoned my old info (which I can't do).

That's basically what I did in conjunction with Obsidian. The notes are in .md format (meaning easily transferable to any program that opens Markdown files) and the attachments are in a few different "resources" folders. Some live on my HD, some in GDrive. All are accessible as normal folders in Windows explorer. I can put links in my Obsidian notes to my GDrive for direct access (or if you prefer, iCloud, Dropbox, etc.). I took all of this year's most important attachments and moved them to GDrive (to keep my Obsidian Vault slim for mobile use), then converted this year's notes and my "evergreen" notes to Obsidian. This did duplicate the 2021 attachments, so I'm weeding those out when I come across them. All my 2010 - 2020 regular EN notes and their attachments got reorganized and converted to Obsidian in a few batches for archiving (my EN was about 15GB). Some of the evergreen notes didn't make it in the initial reorganization, but I can still find them. Due to my habit of giving EN links alias text a lot of my links didn't come across, but the info is all there if I do some extra searching. I do miss some things about EN, but I'm pretty happy with my switch so far.

Here's the thing @mnzau - EN didn't lose it's way, it change direction. It was intentional. V10 is a fundamentally different product than Legacy. Don't expect it to work the same. It just looks similar and works similarly on the user end. The back end is all new and different. Their goal appears to be having as many users as possible on the most stable and simple system. Outlying issues/abandoned features/power users aren't important enough to address. I've tried. v10 is broken for me. I liked Legacy just fine, but they'll cut people off eventually (and the old version of the android app has been painful for a while). I knew it would take me quite a bit of effort to make a switch (11 years of data and 22k+ notes). I finally chose a program months ago, but it took me a while to learn enough about it, weed out some old notes, prep my data for export and figure out how to import into the new program. Two months in, I'm still learning, rethinking workflows, tweaking some broken links and adjusting, but I'm glad to have escaped. I will never again lose data because EN (v10) failed to sync! I don't mean to be mysterious. I chose Obsidian. It was a tough choice. It doesn't work quite like EN (current or past versions). It's also not as user friendly for the casual user. In reality, it's highly flexible (though I don't understand how to implement some of the more advanced plugins). What I like is that it can be tweaked to be very similar to my ideal EN experience and the data is in a future proof format. At this point I'm still referring to EN for older historical data, but that will decrease as time goes on. I was never going to have a clean break, no matter what I chose.

I've been getting it every time I open the app for about a week. Any word on when they'll work on the new version for pre-android 10 models?

@CalSNot TMI - that's great info. Thank you. I like seeing when people figure out ways to handle things that probably aren't quite what EN intended. Anyone can use EN plain vanilla, or you figure out a way to adapt and get around its shortcomings. 😃 @evernoteVeteranI agree completely RE promoting new features vs. not fixing broken function. The thing I finally came to grips with is, even though I'm a 12+ EN Premium user with 22k+ notes, I'm not their target user. They don't actually care that a handful (or few thousand) subscribers quit. Those numbers don't affect their bottom line. The fact is, v10 started with the same general idea of what EN is and does, but was rebuilt from the concept up. v10 is largely or entirely new on the programing side. It bears little relation to Legacy. V10 is intended to look and work across all platforms for EN's own ease. I can appreciate that in theory, but it's not the program I've come to rely on. One of the other inherent issues with having that unified platform, is it's limited by its lowest functioning device type - a touch screen phone. I hate that the new desktop version requires several clicks and/or text inputs to do something like swap what folder a note is in, when in the past I could click on my folder drop down and select the folder, which was often at the top of the list because it was recent. That kind of thing doesn't work so well when the input device is a fingertip. They could improve it somewhat, but those extra clicks are going to remain. As to the thought of finding alternatives - there are suggestions already on these forums, but if you want to create a new round up, go for it. I personally like to see people's opinions of what the best features are on this option or why that program isn't ready for prime time. I might read about an alt and decide it's worth looking into. So far, I haven't found anything that really grabs me as being a solid 1:1 swap for EN as I personally use it. That said, I'm currently evaluating something that takes more knowledge/effort on my part, but would allow be full ownership and portability of my data, if I can adapt my workflows to it. @CalSidea of linking to local files may be one of the key things I need. We'll see. And for the record, while this is an EN forum, hosted by them, I haven't seen much evidence that they pay attention the discussions, let alone respond to them. Forums are here for the users to help each other, which works pretty well. Some knowledgeable users are very generous. I've personally gotten very little satisfaction from opening support tickets since v10, unless I find something that is genuinely a bug (vs working differently than Legacy and feeling bug-like).

@CalS I haven't had very good luck with links to Google Drive, in the past anyway. The idea has merit though. I may have to revisit. Thanks for the reminder. After my post this morning I checked the other files I worked in yesterday and they were all fine. The difference is they were all straight notes, no Excel, (though one had a couple screen shots). What occurred to me is that EN must not register that the Excel is being saved. The same would be true for any file, whether .xls, .doc, .svg, .ai, .pdf, etc. The possible work around is to enter the note after you save whatever file you're working on and add a return, space, dot, etc. to the body of the note, to force a sync. Not elegant, but fairly unobtrusive. I'll try it with a dummy doc later. I'm back in Legacy at the moment.

I brought up the Pro plan possible being difference because some things, like enhanced search, are only available in Pro or higher. For all I know, searching in a PDF or being able to drag/drop it is now a higher $$$ level. I personally disagree that the new plans are an upgrade. Considering how many basic seeming functions work in an entirely different way than in Legacy, anything that doesn't build on the old version feels like a downgrade to me. To the issue at hand, I guess most of what I'm seeing with the PDFs is dependent on how those PDFs were added to EN. But the biggest difference is the fact that each of those was viewable, searchable and copy/paste-able (or drag and drop-able) in Legacy, but NOT in v10. If any of the new behavior is a feature, I consider it a fail. I suppose I should check with support. I'm running up quite a new list for them.

I don't think it was happening back in April when I was on my second round of using v10. I think it's new. Perhaps a support ticket would be good. I have a few for them...

I feel your pain. Today I came into work to discover that an Excel file I keep in EN didn't sync yesterday. I was using the Win desktop only. I do use the android ap, but only occasionally. This particular file is something I keep open all day, every day and update frequently. I save it constantly and compulsively. Thankfully I also print a copy of the latest version at the end of the day. That's how I discovered my numbers were off this morning. I checked the note and it last saved at 8:30am yesterday, when I had it open until 5pm. Now I have to recreate all my work AGAIN. This is the 3rd or 4th time this has happened to me on just this note. No telling which other notes I was in yesterday didn't sync. Honestly, I'm not even mad this time, just... resigned. I have also put in multiple support tickets, provided reproduction steps and logs on various issues, including sync. I've begged for a sync button. They don't appear to care about any of it. I'm going to bring this up to support one more time and switch back to Legacy again, but I think this is my final straw. I realize now that there is no easy swap to something else, so I need to start putting in the work and figuring out new workflows elsewhere. BTW - I find that using Legacy and v10 side by side is a recipe for disaster. This may be one of those user-specific combos of software versions things, but I lose data when I have both open simultaneously or even switching back and forth during the same day.