Backwards Compatibility in Evernote

[cacotigon 24]

Since I got heavily burned the later released starting from around 6.7x onward - I made the calculated decision to revert back to what was (at least for me) the most stable version of Evernote for Windows, 6.4.2.3788 (303788) Public. And life was once again good - it's responsive and has all the features that I want. 

The concern I have going forward is backwards compatibility against the Evernote servers. I want to make sure that Evernote is not going to introduce some changes at the server level that will break syncing with this older version or even worse corrupt notes. Is this a possibility? What is Evernote's stance on running previous versions?

I would hope at the very least that it would warn me with a Popup message at some point that I have to upgrade if that unfortunately becomes a necessity. 

[gazumped 11,656]

Hi.  Older versions of Evernote seem to continue to run until they don't - I'd imagine your first indication of any problem would be a continuing sync failure.  If you're using a recent(ish) older version of the app it's not likely that there will be any problems,  but obviously as time goes on you may have to move forward.  Evernote don't have a 'stance' that I'm aware of,  but they won't let the fact that some users might be on out of date packages prevent them from upgrading the database if and when they feel the need to do so.  If you're not already keeping local backups of your database I'd suggest it would be a good idea.  On balance you're unlikely to lose any data - but do you want to take the chance?

[cacotigon 24]

@gazumped Yeah - I back up all notes basically weekly in the native ENEX format. At the time I made this decision (around 6.8x) I figured the chances of losing data or having it corrupted was actually higher if I ran latest than if I stayed on an older release.

[gazumped 11,656]

17 minutes ago, cacotigon said:

chances of losing data or having it corrupted was actually higher if I ran latest than if I stayed on an older release

You might be right....  

[jefito 5,589]

3 hours ago, cacotigon said:

The concern I have going forward is backwards compatibility against the Evernote servers. I want to make sure that Evernote is not going to introduce some changes at the server level that will break syncing with this older version or even worse corrupt notes. Is this a possibility? What is Evernote's stance on running previous versions?

It's always a possibility, but hopefully there will be an effort to maintain compatibility with the current SDK (see https://dev.evernote.com/doc/). We already know that Spaces are a thing in the Business client, so that's coming, but I doubt that that changes how notebooks, stacks and tags will need to be dealt with all that much. As far as I know, the SDK hasn't been updated to deal with the new stuff, at least the public docs haven't. Whether you can get to notes / notebooks stored in Spaces is another matter; obviously a client that doesn't know about Spaces won't be able to access a Space; how (or whether) the contexts of a Space wiil be made available to an older client is something I don't know.

[Don Dz 165]

Based on some casual observations of my own data, my guess would be that anything with tables, PDF, or similar imported data, would be at a higher risk of data corruption, particularly if the note is created in a later version and then edited with an earlier version.

Anything with plain text should survive an earthquake or tornado, unless it hits the servers directly, for that you have your backups.  ?

[jefito 5,589]

PDFs are just attachments, and should be handled in the UI according to the Evernote client version you're using. I wouldn't worry about those.

Tables are rendered differently in newer Evernote clients, and there's specific UI for editing these. They may be problematic in older versions, but those versions may just default to treating a table as a table. That'd probably be worth testing.

[DTLow 5,736]

17 hours ago, Don Dz said:

Anything with plain text should survive an earthquake or tornado, unless it hits the servers directly, for that you have your backups. 

You can do better than plain text, but may run into problems if you push the envelope with fancy formatting.
The underlying note format, a fork of html, is solid; even fail-safe if you backup to html format.

>>PDF, or similar imported data, would be at a higher risk of data corruption

Attachments (PDFs, images, office/iwork documents) will open in their native app even if Evernote can't process them inline.