(Archived) Backup and Recovery - What To Expect

[MartinPacker 2]

I happen to have just somehow trashed one of my notebooks - Windows 3.1 client crash - but this post really ISN'T about that incident. It's inspired by it...

I'm not sure what the expectations are for backup (on Evernote's server farm) nor recovery...

In my case I sent an email off to Support asking to have the notebook restored. I'd assume that's possible. But I don't know simple things like whether the level of granularity is "the whole ACCOUNT can be restored from the backup we took last Wednesday" or "sure, we take backups of everything every day and you can have your Notebook back from last night's back up - at the NOTEBOOK level" or what.

Can someone enlighten me? And it that's by pointing me at a URL I'll still feel this thread has been worthwhile.

Perhaps I should reveal I come from a mainframe background where we're used to on-command recoveries at various levels of granularity. A "whoops" web page might be nice to consider for the future - if it doesn't already exist.

[engberg 89]

In the more recent versions of the Windows application, if you delete a synchronized notebook, the notes will go into the Trash. To permanently remove them, you'll need to explicitly empty the Trash and say "yes" to the scary warning dialog box that says that this is a permanent operation. If the notes are in the Trash, you can restore them yourself from the desktop client or from the web.

If you make a change to a note, you may also be able to go back to a previous version of the note via our Note History feature as a Premium user:

http://blog.evernote.com/2010/04/14/new ... 0mb-notes/

But if you delete notes and say "yes" to the warning about this being permanent, we will remove the copy of the note from the server as well. As a consumer Internet service, we feel that this is the correct behavior to match users' expectations. I.e. if a consumer deletes something and says "yes, I want it permanently removed", then they would be potentially surprised if we were to keep copies of that note around.

If you have a copy of your database file from (e.g.) a local backup, you may be able to restore your deleted notes from that backup.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Here's a thread that discusses recovering from your own local backup on a Windows box. If your backup was a week or so old, the newly added/changed info should be sync'd down from Evernote's servers after the restore. However, I still prefer to get a backup daily. So my EN folder is included in my automated, nightly backup. I do also take snapshot copies & keep them for a while. That's helpful if you accidentally delete or munge up a note & don't realize it for a week or two. Of course, this isn't fool proof since the file you're looking for may not be included in any of your archived backups.

viewtopic.php?f=53&t=17672&start=0&hilit=restore

[MartinPacker 2]

Right, I'm learning to do that... Take a local backup. I hadn't seen the need before. Whether to backup by copying the whole DB or using ENScript.exe to pull out notebooks is another matter.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

For me, I just backup the entire folder. Mine is currently 3.28 gb & my exb file is 3 gb. So very little extra space used for the miscellaneous other files. For me, this is simply the easiest way. And for me, since I spend more time backing things up (over time) than actually recovering data (thank goodness!), I figure if it's a faster backup & a bit cumbersome to restore, that's ok. Just so long as I can restore. So if I need to restore notes, I'd swap over to an archived exb file, find the note(s) in question (hopefully) & export them to enex file. Revert back to the live database & import the enex file.