(Archived) Evernote Data Directory

[rfaragalla 1]

Hello all,

I'm a noob with Evernote, but it's quickly grown on me and I am having a harder time each day thinking of reasons not to convert to a premium membership. One reason I am holding out, however, is that I don't see that there is anyway to: a) disable caching on a local machine; and relocate/re-direct the data directory to a remote drive. As you know, when you delete/move the directory, Evernote downloads a new copy on login.

Ideally, Evernote would offer the option to disable local caching, except for perhaps indexing and titles (as seems to be the case on the mobile versions for iPad, etc.), but I am open to ideas for other hardware/software/workflow solutions as well. I see that this is not the first post of this nature, but I haven't had any success in finding a suitable work-around.

Fwiw, some background on why I want to do this and my "setup"... I have Evernote installed on my Mac at work and at home. I also have it installed on my iPad, iPhone and Blackberry. This all works flawlessly in my mind. The only problem is with my laptop. Since I travel often, I was willing to sacrifice horsepower and storage for size and weight, and recently bought a Macbook Air with a 128Gb SSD. I have a fair amount of software installed (including BootCamp and Windows apps), so I am low on disk space, and am already in the habit of storing files and media on a separate, portable SSD. Also, it's worth mentioning that if I had Internet access I would just use the Web interface (although imho it is not as elegant as other versions), but I am often on a plane for 10hrs+ without a signal.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me with a hack.

And thanks in advance to *Dave* for listening, and perhaps prioritizing the "disable local caching" and "specify database location" option/features in the dev queue

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

This would be better suited in the Mac section. The Windows client does allow you to move the location of the database.

[rfaragalla 1]

Actually, that is helpful to know... although I'd prefer a Mac-centric solution, I suppose as a last resort i could install Evernote on my Windows partition. Out of curiosity, is the Windows re-direct a "hack" or an option in the Evernote client?

[engberg 89]

The data on the Mac and Windows client isn't just a "cache", it's a 100% full synchronized copy of your account. All operations (searching, sorting, etc.) rely on access to data stored and retrieved from the local database. Things like "thumbnails" of notes are generated based on having access to the full contents of the note locally.

Duplicating the entire client interface to talk to the server for every operation would be both a huge amount of work and also result in something that would probably be unusably slow.

The "no local storage" solution is to use Evernote from the web on that computer. That will send all requests to the service and require no local storage.

[jfwarrior 6]

The data on the Mac and Windows client isn't just a "cache", it's a 100% full synchronized copy of your account. All operations (searching, sorting, etc.) rely on access to data stored and retrieved from the local database. Things like "thumbnails" of notes are generated based on having access to the full contents of the note locally.

Duplicating the entire client interface to talk to the server for every operation would be both a huge amount of work and also result in something that would probably be unusably slow.

The "no local storage" solution is to use Evernote from the web on that computer. That will send all requests to the service and require no local storage.

Yes, but you would lose functionality that comes with the desktop client. Couldn't there be an option to have the desktop application function like the iPhone/iPod Touch version for the people who require such functionality? (Grabbing headers of the notes and only downloading the ones that are favourited or set in the settings?)

[engberg 89]

For people who don't want to store any data on their computers, we're much more inclined to improve the web-based experience rather than doubling the size of the desktop client to try to implement this edge case.

What operation are you trying to do that can't be done via the web?

[skumaravel 0]

My requirement is similar, I like to change the default storage location on my mac from ../library/application support/evernote/data to someother folder.

I use a much thin lappy in which am running out of space.

Am little used to mac client and am not comfortable with web interface.

Kumar

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

this is a big problem, isn't it. the macbook air comes with 64gb. the evernote library cannot be moved. i think i have something like 7gb now and growing 1gb per month.

@engberg

as suggested, please consider the option of running it like the ios platform does (headers and offline folders). the web client is ok, but really basic stuff with drag and drop, tagging multiple notes at once, fonts (as i recall), inserting multiple note links at once, offline usage, etc. are impossible. i tried using just the web interface for a while with my air, but it was infuriating. i got rid of the air...if we could at least move the library to external storage that would be something.