Please reintroduce the possibility of select ALL notes!

[NicoSwitzerland 0]

I'm very sad since the 10th version of Evernote, wich stopped the possibility to select all the notes – fox ex, in the purpose to export all the notes, for a back up, local and/or cloud.

Dear expert users, do you have a tip for a complete external backup?

(And sorry for my uggly english, it's a cry from the heart 🙂 ).

 

 

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Hi. Did you mean to post this as a Mac OSX question, because iOS has never been able to select a bunch of notes (without selecting them one by one) or export them (without doing it one at a time). On OSX, my advice is to use the Legacy version of the app, which retains this important feature along with a bunch of others. For my workflow, at least, the new version of the app is a significant downgrade.

[DTLow 5,736]

3 hours ago, NicoSwitzerland said:

do you have a tip for a complete external backup?

I moved the discussion from the IOS forum     
Export is a Windows/Mac function

Separate exports for each notebook are recommended     
- retains notebook assignment   
- there's no limit on # of notes

[NicoSwitzerland 0]

On 5/20/2021 at 11:20 PM, GrumpyMonkey said:

Hi. Did you mean to post this as a Mac OSX question, because iOS has never been able to select a bunch of notes (without selecting them one by one) or export them (without doing it one at a time). On OSX, my advice is to use the Legacy version of the app, which retains this important feature along with a bunch of others. For my workflow, at least, the new version of the app is a significant downgrade.

Sorry for the bad location.

Thanks for the idea. I use the Legacy for this operation, but as You said, this verison 10 is a loss on this point.

 

[PinkElephant 8,105]

Exporting all notes at once never made much sense, not in legacy or else.

The note-notebook relation gets lost in export. What you end up with is a heap of exported notes, that have lost organisation.

Both v10 and legacy can export notebook by notebook. The advantage of legacy is that you can use Apple script to automatically select and export all notebooks

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

On 5/30/2021 at 6:56 AM, PinkElephant said:

Exporting all notes at once never made much sense, not in legacy or else.

The note-notebook relation gets lost in export. What you end up with is a heap of exported notes, that have lost organisation.

Both v10 and legacy can export notebook by notebook. The advantage of legacy is that you can use Apple script to automatically select and export all notebooks

It makes sense to me. If you rely on tags rather than notebooks, or simply on the notes themselves (with a naming system), then they are organized when exporting 10 or 10,000.

- sometimes you want to export the notes related to a project

- you want to export notes that match certain search criteria

- you want to select a bunch of notes and tag them

- you want to select a bunch of notes and move them into a notebook

- you want to make a "table of contents" note

Now, all of this is impossible. The reduction in functionality breaks my workflow, and while I understand that the loss of functionality may have no impact at all on other folks, I think the default decision with the app should be to avoid breaking things. Wouldn't it be a lot more fun for everyone if features were refined to perfection instead of suddenly stripped out, added in half-baked / radically altered, or broken? In particular, I think this'd be nice for some of the "core" features.

Refined to perfection--what do I mean? Well, for example, iOS still doesn't enable us to select all and move stuff around. Instead of removing the feature from v. 10, and being criticized for it on the forums, they could have added it to iOS and been praised for it. Both of the decisions involve "change," so I don't think users are necessarily averse to changes. I think the issue we have is with decisions that break stuff--even if a feature doesn't make sense to developers today, I can say from experience that users have requested improvements to the selecting / manipulating of notes and worked with developers to implement these improvements little by little over the years. It is a little disappointing to see all of the hard work and collaboration go to waste like this.

 

 

[PinkElephant 8,105]

When you don’t use notebooks to organize your notes, you probably don’t have many.

So just export that mega-notebook, and you are done.

Since the notes are kept on the cloud server, this „gimme a full backup“ is like using a belt, and add suspenders. Possible, but IMHO not very elegant.

Currently there is the legacy client for those who want to run whatever backup they want,

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

On 6/2/2021 at 1:41 AM, PinkElephant said:

When you don’t use notebooks to organize your notes, you probably don’t have many.

So just export that mega-notebook, and you are done.

Since the notes are kept on the cloud server, this „gimme a full backup“ is like using a belt, and add suspenders. Possible, but IMHO not very elegant.

Currently there is the legacy client for those who want to run whatever backup they want,

I don’t know how many notes would be many, but I currently have several thousand in Evernote (5,000+) and several tens of thousands if you count the stuff I have exported into other apps after partially migrating my workflow out of Evernote (when 10 was released). From its origins, Evernote has emohasized tags over notebooks, so I guess lots of folks who bought into this strategy have few, if any, notebooks. Again, my issue with 10 is not that one workflow is better than another, but rather that 10 breaks workflows (see examples above—some of which Evernote have been promoted by Evernote) for no reason that I can see (do any other apps limit the number of notes you can select at any one time?) and without any obvious benefits.

<backups>
I think “give me a full backup” would be a wonderful idea. And, it seems quite elegant to me. Having notes on someone else’s computers without a backup, to continue your sartorial analogy, is like keeping all of your clothes at a neighbor’s house. Convenient, I suppose, unless they accidentally wash colors and whites (data corruption has happened), leave the door to their house unlocked and open (hacking has happened), or lose your clothes (data loss has happened). If you have a backup, you just pull your clothes out of storage and get on with things. If anything, making backups ought to have been made easier and more robust, because users could be confident of not getting trapped in a data silo.

<organize according to the lowest common denominator>
In the end, Legacy makes it pretty easy to backup your data, especially if you do not rely on Evernote-specific tools to organize your notes. In my case, I use certain naming conventions and other primitive methods rather than notebooks and tags. I’ve written at length about this on the forums (using only the organizational tools available on every client and an organizational method that would survive export into another app)—your mileage may vary with this system, but it is well-suited to the way Evernote was structured up until version 10 (tried and tested over 12 years of use). However, Legacy is not a long-term solution (it has been abandoned), and I agree with the original poster that restricting the number of notes selected in this way is an undesirable “feature” of the new Evernote, especially for users with large amounts of data and many notes to manipulate.

<refine rather than abandon>
As an example of what is possible when restrictions are removed, one app I use can perform actions such as sorting content into specified locations following rules that I define, and depending on what I am doing, I might have hundreds or thousands of items moved about in a day. Today, for example, I scanned or received dozens of documents related to a meeting at work. I just dragged them into a folder and the app did all the work automatically, instantly, and without any effort on my part beyond the time it took to scan in the documents / drag them out of emaills into the folder. When ypu go paperless (nearly 100 percent in my case) and have a steady stream of “input” like this, without tools to manipulate data at scale, you risk becoming overwhelmed by it all. Rather than arbitrarily restricting our ability to select notes, why not leave the feature alone (as it has been for more than 12 years) and add more functionality / power like this? I doubt any users would complain about having their notes automatically tagged and sorted at scale

[John Markoff 1]

I was very disappointed by the 50 note limit in the new export version.  I have roughly 1500 notes, some of them with hundreds of documents inside. I would like to export for a specific bit of analysis I want to do (did I mention how useless string search is when you have 16 gigabytes of data?).  Sigh.

[PinkElephant 8,105]

You can export a complete notebook, independent from the number of notes it contains.

Or install the legacy client, that has no cap on the number of notes that can be selected.

There was a possibility to raise the limit in earlier releases of EN v10 by modifying a parameter file. This no longer works, it seems the 50 notes limit is now hardcoded.