One Question about Organisation: A lot of Notes in one Notebook vs. more Notebooks with less Notes

[AsMiSc 2]

We got round about 8.000 Notes per Year in one Notebook (Most of them with big PDF-Files). Whats better for Syncing and Organisation: Make a Notebook per Year (Folder 2020, Folder 2021, etc) or put all Notes in one Notebook, so se will have 80.000 Notes in the next 10 Years in one Notebook. - I know the limit is far away, but is there a better Performance with less notes in a Notebook? Thx for hints and answers. 

BTW: We love Evernote - You have changed our way to work. 

[gazumped 11,664]

Hi.  I've had about 40,000 notes in one notebook before things started to slow down, but it depends (I think) more on what sort of information you have and how you find things.  I've now split my notes into about 300 notebooks each of which contains all notes, emails and clips related to one person, firm or project.  So - What did we last order from Amazon?  Open that notebook / sort by title (where we date each note) / and you have the latest information.  What's happening on the Fusion project?  Open that notebook...  

There are some fudges where we buy stuff from Amazon for the Fusion project,  but that's what Tags are made for...

Our view anyways!

[DTLow 5,736]

4 hours ago, AsMiSc said:

Whats better for Syncing and Organisation

Personally, I basically use one notebook (15k notes)   
I only use additional notebooks if I have a need (share etc)   
but have no problem splitting my filing notebook if it's an issue

I generally don't use notebooks as an organization tool; that's what tags are for

[DTLow 5,736]

10 minutes ago, gazumped said:

but that's what Tags are made for.

Agreed
So, why the 300 notebooks?

[CalS 5,280]

4 hours ago, AsMiSc said:

We got round about 8.000 Notes per Year in one Notebook (Most of them with big PDF-Files). Whats better for Syncing and Organisation: Make a Notebook per Year (Folder 2020, Folder 2021, etc) or put all Notes in one Notebook, so se will have 80.000 Notes in the next 10 Years in one Notebook. - I know the limit is far away, but is there a better Performance with less notes in a Notebook? Thx for hints and answers. 

BTW: We love Evernote - You have changed our way to work. 

I would consider backups in your strategy.

I have 51K notes across basically 5 notebooks, the largest has 29K notes in it.  I could get buy with 2 notebooks, one for synced and one for local (though if EN does not change their thinking local will be a thing of the past when the "legacy" versions sunset).  I expanded to 5 to facilitate backup. 

I think 80K large PDF notes in one notebook might make backups problematic.  Year would work fine as a notebook breakout.

[gazumped 11,664]

24 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Agreed
So, why the 300 notebooks?

 

35 minutes ago, gazumped said:

There are some fudges...

This is one of those YMMV cases. I find that saving searches for different things - like tag:amazon - generates a LOT of saved searches,  many of which I forget I have; so I duplicate searches or individually create new ones to get to the first stage in any search.  But I realised that most of my searches were about something sent to <topic> / received from <topic> / about <topic>.  So it seemed to make sense to organise my data around the topics - people / places / projects so that I could jump start any search just by looking at a notebook.  Since I normally keep my content in title sorted order,  and add a yyyymmdd date at the start of each title,  they're already in 'most recent' order.  So two clicks gets me to a screen-full of information that almost certainly contains the details I'm looking for.  It also means I rarely have to worry about a series of tags for <content> <source> <date> or whatever.

The fudgy bit comes when I have emails from individuals about projects that 'could' be filed in more than one notebook;  I have to make a decision then as to which is most important.  My choice is usually project (for filing) so I add tags for people and places.

I like the setup because I never have queries about where to file stuff (any more...) and my tags are reasonably few and far between.  So the "time to find" is pretty low as a rule.  It's what we always say - it works for me;  YMMV!!  

[CalS 5,280]

Funny how we all have a different eye as to what is "pleasing".  I started back in the day with notebooks for projects and quickly morphed to tags, basically the notebook name preceded by a period for easy access.  Then F6 and Ctrl+Q and Shift+Alt+T became my friends.  More comfortable typing tags then selecting notebooks I suppose.  Plus the odd search/tag added to the shortcuts bar.  As you say, YMMV.

[stocky2605 401]

I have three types of notebooks:

1. no sharing required (my stuff, inbox and repository)
2. sharing required (content shared with others)
3. temporarily project (easy access, after finishing assign tags and move to 1. or 2.)

I‘ve a total of 10 notebooks (1.: 2, 2.: 4, 3.: 4), 411 tags (incl. nested tags). Filterize.net to automate, support inheritance of nested tags and auto TOC. Total of 8.000 notes (so, yet no issue at all regarding „too many notes per notebook“). At a larger # of notes I‘d consider to have one notebook per year to make it easier to backup.

I rely on tags. I‘ve tags for every year, e. g. 2019, 2020, etc. (automatically assigned by Filterize.net as soon as something arrives in inbox -> easy to access instead of a „search by created:“)

I don‘t have changed this scenario since 4 years - seems to work for me 🙂