(Archived) An OCR/Security Question for Local Notebooks

[emjoyner 0]

I am a current Premium user, but I only use the service for documents that are not of significant importance. I am trying to determine whether or not I want to move my more private documents to a Local Evernote notebook vs. Devonthink which I use now, but I have a question about this option.

I want to be able to take advantage of Evernote's OCR capabilities, but I do not want certain files stored in the cloud. If I put a document into a synced notebook to have it OCR'd, but then move it to a local notebook, 1) Are any traces of the document still available on Evernote servers, and 2) will the Desktop software still be able to take advantage of the OCR in the document if I no longer have it in a synced notebook? I'm pretty sure that the latter is a "yes" based on some quick testing, but the former is what I am curious about. Being able to encrypt PDFs would be awesome, but I know this feature does not currently exist.

One feature that would be great in this situation would be if Evernote offered wifi sharing for Local Notebooks. This way, the documents in my local notebooks would not hit the cloud, but I could access all of them from the machines on my wifi network (including my iPad and iPhone). This way, I could at least see all of those documents while in the house, but then would lose access once I left the wifi network. Would be a very cool option, but no clue how difficult this would be.

Let me know your thoughts on the question above. Thank you.

Eric

[baumgarr 17]

As long as you give it enough time to do the indexing & you synchronize again to pull in the indexed information, then when you move it to a local notebook you can still search that text. The information stays with the note regardless if it is in a local or synchronized notebook.

They've said in their podcasts that if you delete a note it is removed from their servers, however there may still be a copy in any backups they have. Any backups going forward will not contain the deleted note, but going through all their backups to delete notes is impractical since some of them may not even be on site.

You're not the first one to ask for local synchronizing. Their response in the past was that it wasn't in their current plans due to the complexity it would add.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

They've said in their podcasts that if you delete a note it is removed from their servers, however there may still be a copy in any backups they have. Any backups going forward will not contain the deleted note, but going through all their backups to delete notes is impractical since some of them may not even be on site.

There's a saying that once something is on the internet, it's out there forever. IMO, Evernote is not really designed to store sensitive information like bank or credit card statements, copies of your taxes, etc.

[emjoyner 0]

Thanks to you both for the feedback. It seems like there really is no good way to manage a paperless workflow for important document that allows for some portability, but security as well.

DevonThink is a pretty good piece of software, but it has some quirks. The tagging implementation (my preferred method of entry) isn't very clean, and the web server that they offer limits file size that it will display to 2MB. So, if I have scanned a multi-page PDF, when I try to access it from my other computers/iphone/ipad, I get, "sorry, the file is >2MB." Extremely annoying. Lastly, it's not a very clean piece of software in my opinion. I also cannot share the database across multiple computers without risking corruption.

Evernote on the other hand, looks cleaner, and has great tagging support. It doesn't allow for separate folders (although I can create different notebooks for companies/categories) which isn't ideal, but I can work with it. I can use my Scansnap to do the OCR, but that definitely slows down the scanning process, and it doesn't help with handwritten documents.

I may have to just use Scansnap, OCR the documents as they come in, and add them to a Local Evernote notebook. If I need to ever access the documents, I will have to just go to the machine that has the files and sort them from there.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Thanks to you both for the feedback. It seems like there really is no good way to manage a paperless workflow for important document that allows for some portability, but security as well.

There are many good ways to manage sensitive info.

I use Jungle Disk as an online backup option. The data is encrypted & I can access it from any web browser. It's not terribly convenient that way, but it's good to know I can access my data if my entire computer is stolen. (The desktop version is easier, of course, & makes JD a virtual drive on your desktop.) Since Jungle Disk is designed for this purpose, they do not store my encryption code. If I lose it, they cannot help me recover my data.

I also store sensitive data on portable USB drives in a Truecrypted container. Similarly, when using Truecrypt, if you lose your password, no one can help you recover your data.

For PINS, passwords, family SSNs etc, I use a password manager that stores the info on my desktop as well as my iPhone. Password managers store your info encrypted.

I've discussed my use of both of these products many times on this board. If you're interested, do a search on Jungle Disk and/or Truecrypt.

The reason EN doesn't encrypt your data is they would need your password in order to build the search index. And if a service has access to your password, any successful hacker would be able to gain access to it, too. Think in terms of a safe deposit box. If you only needed the bank's key to gain access, the level of security goes down. As long as your key is also required to open it, then it's pretty much impossible for a bank employee to get into your safe deposit box.

[emjoyner 0]

Really appreciate the reply. Is JungleDisk like Dropbox? I have a dropbox account, but of course the issue is the search capability from various devices (i.e. I can't just search in the Dropbox app and have it find the words in an OCR document. It also doesn't offer/respond to tagging). The other issue is security, but the jungledisk-style of encryption may be something Dropbox doesn't offer.

Maybe you can provide some additional thoughts if I give more detail.

What I want is a simple "microfiche" style system for keeping and accessing paper documents we collect as a family. Because certain documents have multiple uses, simply scanning and creating folders won't really work (I really don't want to try to use aliases - tagging works better for me). B/c of this, a simple folder style setup (on dropbox or a local machine) isn't ideal.

Our documents could be as simple as a receipt for a tax deductible purchase, or as private as retirement account financial statements. In the former, Evernote works well b/c no matter how I get the receipt (in paper form from a vendor, in an email, or on my bank statement/paypal) I can easily clip it into or add it to Evernote from a number of different machines (I currently own and use 3, and also have multiple portable devices). I can then tag the document so that it is searchable, and the OCR-based searching allows for detail to be found inside of the document itself if needed. Perfect.

For the more private information, I obviously want more security, but I'd like to have the files available, and search-able, from numerous machines. So, if I want to find the March 2009 Retirement statement, I can just type it into the search bar and the document appears. If I can perform this search from any of those computers and access the document, perfect. Lastly, having a viewer that is more of a dedicated viewing package than say Mac's Preview software would be ideal.

If Devonthink didn't have the limitation on the file sizes, it would probably work ok for me. I enjoy being able to use my iPad to see PDF's of all of my documents, and the searching works pretty well over the Devonthink web server. But, if most of your files are greater than 2MB, it doesn't work very well. I may have to try to scan at a lower quality level to get documents under 2MB and continue to use that approach.

The USB key won't work well for me, as I don't want to have to keep up with anything, and I don't want to have to rely on finding a PC to get access to the files (I'd almost rather have 1 machine and use something like Logmein from my phone to email a file to myself).

Let me know any additional thoughts that you have.