Is it safe to upgrade yet ?

[David Navigator 18]

I've been holding off upgrading from the legacy version as last time I looked, the current release was not really of a high enough standard.

Since then I've kept away from the forums, but now I wonder if it's time to upgrade ?

The things that were missing from V10 that stopped me previously were

1. No import folder (I believe that this has now been fixed)?
2. No easy way to quickly switch between my personal evernotes and my business ones. I don't mind two logins, but I need to be able to switch between the active one quickly as I do this many times a day.
3. No way to keep the full database locally either as the live database or as an automatic backup. I don't trust EN sufficiently to not have a local copy of all my data.

Is it time for me to upgrade or am I still unwise to do so ?

David

[gazumped 11,666]

Hi.  If it's any guide - I'm continuing to use the pre-Legacy versions of Evernote for Windows and Android until they're pried from my cold,  dead laptop.  But that's because what I have going here works for me,  and I have no intention of breaking my workflow for hours or days while I convert to a new system.  I am using Evernote v10 in Beta on Linux,  because that's my test system;  and it has a lot going for it.  But the bits I need are already available in my current versions.  I'm happy where I am.

Legacy will run alongside v10,  and if you upgrade,  you'll be able to try the new services for yourself.  If you need local backups,  you can continue to run them on Legacy (its local database is kept up to date with changes via v10).  You could even use Legacy to access one set of notes and keep v10 for the other to avoid switching.  And yes,  Import Folders are back.

Legacy apps will not be updated from where they are,  and v10 will no doubt be getting more features and security updates in future,  so I guess I'll be dragged kicking and screaming into the 25th-and-a-half Century with everyone else - but for the moment I'm good here,  thanks...

[buckethead 218]

2 hours ago, David Navigator said:

No way to keep the full database locally either as the live database or as an automatic backup. I don't trust EN sufficiently to not have a local copy of all my data.

Not sure this is going to be an option with v10? I do not recall this ever being mentioned as something they were working towards. 
 

 

[PinkElephant 8,114]

The desktop clients hold a full local copy, if enabled in settings.

On the mobile clients you can decide per notebook whether to download locally. All notebooks is an option as well, if the device has enough memory.

[buckethead 218]

19 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

The desktop clients hold a full local copy, if enabled in settings.

On the mobile clients you can decide per notebook whether to download locally. All notebooks is an option as well, if the device has enough memory.

Are you talking about the "Save Data on Logout" option? Is this really the same as the previous versions of being able to keep the data base local? I figured this option was just a way to prevent having the client download all data from EN again.

[Jon/t 1,289]

49 minutes ago, buckethead said:

Are you talking about the "Save Data on Logout" option? Is this really the same as the previous versions of being able to keep the data base local? I figured this option was just a way to prevent having the client download all data from EN again.

The local copy seems to be just for offline use.... there's no option to have things local only as in not in the EN cloud.

[David Navigator 18]

11 minutes ago, Jon/t said:

The local copy seems to be just for offline use.... there's no option to have things local only as in not in the EN cloud.

I don't mind my data being on the cloud as long as there is a full copy which is usable on my machine. If Evernote went bust, I want to be 100% certain that all my data is accessible.

[agsteele 2,950]

50 minutes ago, Jon/t said:

there's no option to have things local only as in not in the EN cloud

Correct. That's been clear since v10 was released. Local folders were removed with v10. To use local folders you need to stick with Legacy.

[agsteele 2,950]

40 minutes ago, David Navigator said:

I don't mind my data being on the cloud as long as there is a full copy which is usable on my machine. If Evernote went bust, I want to be 100% certain that all my data is accessible.

I'm not sure that this has ever been a possibility. Even with Legacy authentication was required with the servers to connect up the software. I think the only option would be to schedule regular exports of your notebooks as .enex or whatever you wish. Choose the format that enables you access the content either standalone or via import into an alternative application.

I guess, though, there's no more certainty that Notion, Joplin or whatever software you switch to is any more secure in terms of longevity. My personal view is that Evernote is not likely to collapse and I can afford a routine export/save/backup process... YMMV

[qwazerty 7]

2 hours ago, Jon/t said:

The local copy seems to be just for offline use.... there's no option to have things local only as in not in the EN cloud.

A possible work around is adding a link to a local file on your disk. In windows for instance, you can drag a file shortcut in your note. In the note body you can write additional (meta) info for searching...

[Dab 5]

A Request to the CEO...

Would it be possible to continue to support Legacy in the long term as an un-syncing stand-alone product?

Evernote in its stand-alone form is still a class leader with only Joplin to challenge it and I really don’t want to have to jump ships.

I have checked out version 10 and I get why it is being developed but it really is of no interest to me, I don’t need syncing across multiple devices or calendars or task lists.

I do need a single database that is local.

I am sure that the original Evernote database concept still has many fans and I for one would be happy to continue paying a subscription to use it.

My concern is what happens when we get a significant change like Windows 11, will software rust eventually stop Legacy from working.

Still hoping for a miracle.

Best Regards

Dab Alden

 

[David Navigator 18]

20 hours ago, agsteele said:

My personal view is that Evernote is not likely to collapse

There are many firms that everyone thought were secure, that went bust. Unless you're on the board of Evernote I doubt you have more internal financial info available to you than I do ?

Quote

I can afford a routine export/save/backup process

Can you expand on this please. I though there wasn't a way to export all my notes either via a single mouse click (poor 'cos I have to remember) or via an automated process. If I've misunderstood I'd be grateful if you could point me to a solution. Doesn't need to be free, just robust & reliable.
 

[gazumped 11,666]

1 hour ago, David Navigator said:

There are many firms that everyone thought were secure, that went bust.

In general terms I think you're pretty safe whatever happens.  Evernote has 200M+ users (that's a country the size of Pakistan or a large slice of India) and lots of current competitors - although the quality of their services is pretty variable.  However.  If these nice other companies see any reasonable chance of snagging a chunk of customers from Evernote - like if they announce they're shutting down next week (which they're not) but if they were... the 'import from Evernote' options would treble overnight.  Regardless of what Evernote does,  the market can't let that many potential paying customers get away. 

Obviously a big part of that number are currently Free users - but if someone offered an option that wasn't too expensive they'd probably get their hand bitten off.

1 hour ago, David Navigator said:

I'd be grateful if you could point me to a solution.

I use a Legacy account (with over 300 notebooks) and an outfit called Backupery regularly exports all 30+GB of my notes to ENEX files while I'm somewhere else.  There's some thought that you can copy the temporary database which v10 sets up on your laptop to achieve more or less the same thing,  but I tend to doubt that.  I'm using v10 on the web and as a Linux Beta user,  and all my v10 notes get added to my legacy account - though I can't access tasks or the home page from there.

1 hour ago, Dab said:

Would it be possible to continue to support Legacy in the long term as an un-syncing stand-alone product?

We've said before that using a primarily web-based tool aimed at note access from anywhere as a single-user flat database is a bit like keeping a car so you can picnic in the driveway.  Evernote Legacy will inevitably get less secure,  less access to Google's servers - and probably fail to run in due course as the various OS's are upgraded with time.  Evernote won't maintain it - they've no need to keep that expertise going;  they're fully Electron-based now and 100% behind the new app.

We're mainly users here so if you want Ian Small to see your request,  you'll need to find his contact addresses somewhere,  but I wouldn't hold out much hope...

[agsteele 2,950]

1 hour ago, David Navigator said:

There are many firms that everyone thought were secure, that went bust. Unless you're on the board of Evernote I doubt you have more internal financial info available to you than I do ?

Can you expand on this please. I though there wasn't a way to export all my notes
 

I don't claim inside knowledge, just said that my view is that Evernote doesn't look likely to fold. As I noted, YMMV.

I'm fortunate, I'm a tagger. So most of my notes are in a single notebook. It is easy to export that notebook in v10. Even in Legacy, exporting notes was best done by notebook in order to retain notebook structures which a whole account export didn't support.

 

[David Navigator 18]

9 minutes ago, agsteele said:

I don't claim inside knowledge, just said that my view is that Evernote doesn't look likely to fold.

 

Even if it wasn't due to financial issues, the "impossible" sometimes happens 

https://www.techspot.com/news/92822-japanese-university-loses-77tb-research-data-following-buggy.html

[David Navigator 18]

1 hour ago, David Navigator said:

Even if it wasn't due to financial issues, the "impossible" sometimes happens 

Seem like only earlier today some users were unable to access Evernote due, it seems, to an expired certificate. 
That doesn't give me confidence if something so simple can be overlooked !!

[gazumped 11,666]

4 minutes ago, David Navigator said:

That doesn't give me confidence

It can be hard to be perfect I know,  but they don't drop service very often...

[David Navigator 18]

12 minutes ago, gazumped said:

It can be hard to be perfect I know,  but they don't drop service very often...

I don't expect perfection or even a 100% uptime, but I do expect a way to use a local copy of my data in the event that the servers aren't contactable. From what I understand, that's not automatic ?

[gazumped 11,666]

9 minutes ago, David Navigator said:

I do expect a way to use a local copy of my data in the event that the servers aren't contactable

If you have Legacy or your v10 is set to save your notes locally,  you should be good to go for 99% of cases...

[Dab 5]

4 minutes ago, gazumped said:

If you have Legacy or your v10 is set to save your notes locally,  you should be good to go for 99% of cases...

I believe you have to be logged in to your account when using Legacy to be able to access your local data. 

If there is a work around to this without having to use another database tool or daily enex or html backups I would like to know about it.

[gazumped 11,666]

You seem to want a way to use Evernote without actually using Evernote.  Based off of a 2-hour outage that's the first issue Evernote's servers have had in recent history,  I'd think reasonable precautions would be to leave Legacy or v10 logged in and just close the window down so you can access your local notes if and when necessary.  External backups don't need to be daily unless you're incredibly productive and IME are mainly there in case a long-unused note turns out to have lost its content or attachments when revived.  If Evernote is available,  Note History should cover that;  if not,  a backup will have preserved the archived data.

[Dab 5]

4 minutes ago, gazumped said:

You seem to want a way to use Evernote without actually using Evernote.  Based off of a 2-hour outage that's the first issue Evernote's servers have had in recent history,  I'd think reasonable precautions would be to leave Legacy or v10 logged in and just close the window down so you can access your local notes if and when necessary.  External backups don't need to be daily unless you're incredibly productive and IME are mainly there in case a long-unused note turns out to have lost its content or attachments when revived.  If Evernote is available,  Note History should cover that;  if not,  a backup will have preserved the archived data.

No that is not the point. The point is, what happens if one day Evernote goes into liquidation and the servers are turned off suddenly. After all this has happend to many gas and electricity companies in the UK. I am very pro Evernote but I would have preffered it if they had split Legacy off and continued it with a small support team rather than putting all of their eggs in the V10 basket. 

 

[PinkElephant 8,114]

These energy companies fell victim to their own greed: They sold energy long term to their customers, but purchased the quantities at least partly on the spot market.

Once the shortcterm contracts got more expensive than the long term commitments, this strategy turned against them.

It is complete nonsense to compare this speculative behavior with running a cloud service.

EN has a pretty stable income: On average each month 1/12th of the subscriptions expire - what is equal to 11/12th continue for at least another month. Service is paid in advance, which reduces the risk of returned invoices.

Servers, offices, staff and the like are long term fixed cost, that will not shift like short term energy prices do.

Pretty predictable business case.

But why worry about real risks in life when you can imagine some ?

[David Navigator 18]

6 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Pretty predictable business case.

But why worry about real risks in life when you can imagine some ?

You're missing the point. Unless you're sat in the boardroom you can't know everything that is going on. 
There are many ways that Evernote could fail to be online for a period of time. We simply want to make sure that if that did happen, that we could still access our data.
At the moment it seems that's not possible. 

[agsteele 2,950]

I think we're going around in circles here... Since we're all just users and each of our requirements and experiences are personal all we can do is share our personal place.

There isn't a cloud service where we can say with certainty that it will be around tomorrow so we make the best estimate of risk to ourselves and our data that we can.

We've pointed to ways in which Evernote data can be exported if you feel the need. We've also said that for many of us the future of Evernote is as secure as we need it to be whilst recognising others want more.

Since you are so uncertain about the future with Evernote I'd recommend one of the many alternatives. However, they, too, come with risk and work differently to Evernote.

I hope you are successful in your search.

[PinkElephant 8,114]

@David Navigator Thanks for the nice feedback - missing a point that is made based on senseless assumptions is what I intended.

Some people in this thread drive a storyline that is based on quicksand. If they run out of money, they go bankrupt. They don’t get funds from investors, they don’t issue bonds, they don’t raise prices, they don’t cut cost - no, they put their belly up and go belly up.

What a complete nonsense !

If you want to know if anything happens, just watch the release cycle. While they perform like they did the last year, no need to worry. While they were struggling with legacy to match OS updates, there was reason to worry. But not economically, more for taking the wrong turn technologically.

But we could all be wrong - maybe they discover the moths took over the socks deposit left from the old management, they need to depreciate it, and - boom. Surviving all bugs, to be taken out of business by moths. Now, this is something to worry about, don’t you think ?

[David Navigator 18]

Quote

There isn't a cloud service where we can say with certainty that it will be around tomorrow

Absolutely, but all of the ones that I use such for storing critical data such as Google Docs, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Photos, Flickr allow me to "backup" my data to my local machine in a way that I can access that data completely and accurately without any internet connection.
Whether that's because, they've gone bust, a digger has cut through the fibre in my street or simply that I haven't paid my phone bill, I should still be able to read my data.

Unless I'm mistaken EN doesn't allow this. I don't seem to be able to read exb or enex files without an active connection to Evernote (please correct me if I'm wrong) and the HTML backups seem to bare little resemblance to the original note.

Quote

 I'd recommend one of the many alternatives

After 13 (paid) years with EN I'm too far in to start changing, but until recently I always assumed that my EN data was as secure as the rest of my data - being backed up along with my other critical data. V10 (originally) keeping the data only online stopped me from upgrading, but now it seems that even legacy won't let me read my data without an internet connection.

[PinkElephant 8,114]

If they go bust … I trust somebody will buy them and continue the service. Too big to vanish, because the customer base is too valuable.

If somebody cuts the fibre … it will be restored, and meanwhile I am on my 5G/LTE connection.

If I am not able to pay my phone bill … I will not be sitting at home to admire my data hoard, I will be out to make a buck.

If this is what you are bothering all day, life must be miserable. And you better get another service, based on local storage. Plus a power generator, because the same guy cutting fibers may be around cutting wires as well …

There are some good local note services, like Synologys Note Station or DEVONthink running on Macs. I do not mention QNAP any longer for a reason. They just had a spectacular security breach, the last one in a row. It seems they have some underlying security issues with their OS.

[Dab 5]

15 hours ago, David Navigator said:

Absolutely, but all of the ones that I use such for storing critical data such as Google Docs, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Photos, Flickr allow me to "backup" my data to my local machine in a way that I can access that data completely and accurately without any internet connection.
Whether that's because, they've gone bust, a digger has cut through the fibre in my street or simply that I haven't paid my phone bill, I should still be able to read my data.

Unless I'm mistaken EN doesn't allow this. I don't seem to be able to read exb or enex files without an active connection to Evernote (please correct me if I'm wrong) and the HTML backups seem to bare little resemblance to the original note.

After 13 (paid) years with EN I'm too far in to start changing, but until recently I always assumed that my EN data was as secure as the rest of my data - being backed up along with my other critical data. V10 (originally) keeping the data only online stopped me from upgrading, but now it seems that even legacy won't let me read my data without an internet connection.

Hi David, I have been using Evernote since 2010.

You are correct that if you are logged out of Evernote you cannot access your Legacy data.

I have 4 accounts and as I don't pay for all of them there are always at least 2 accounts that I am not logged into at any one time.

Some of the accounts contain client information that I cannot store online, and all of my data is in local notebooks for this reason.

I have several hundred local notebooks and as Evernote is perfect for the way I work, I hope that I do not have to migrate as equivalent product options seem very sparse (possibly only Joplin).

Because the accounts are also used with V10 I think that the risk of losing access to them is extremely small and in the worst-case scenario my understanding is that the exb files could be accessed using an alternative database software although the output would not be very user friendly.

Since V10 started I have been doing regular enex and html backups in case a problem with Legacy occurs.

I think what I would like to see from Evernote is a commitment that a method of accessing EXB files will always be available as long as the company is trading.

Unfortunately, as this is rather unlikely, I just hope that Evernote continues to support Legacy for a few years at least and gives us a long warning, at least a year, so there is time to select an alternative product to migrate to.

I for one would like to just be able to continue to use Evernote in its Legacy form into my dotage but I fear that will not be allowed to happen.

Best Regards

Dab. 

[eric99 980]

17 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

 I do not mention QNAP any longer for a reason. They just had a spectacular security breach, the last one in a row. It seems they have some underlying security issues with their OS.

This disproves again the misbelief that your data is more secure in your private cloud  than in a public one like evernote.