Should I backup?

[sirmorbach 0]

Greetings, friends,

My Evernote is working just fine, but I'd like to know if I should backup my notes. The point is: I have one specific notebook that is very very important, for it contains the notes for my ongoing research. Are there reasons why i should — or should not — back up? 

I mean, (1) is it possible for my files to get lost for any reason? Also, (2) if I decide to back up just in case, does anything happen to my note as it is on the web? Will I lose it on the app/web version, and just have it as .html? Or do I get to keep both the back up version and the regular one?

Thank you very much indeed!

[gazumped 12,072]

Hi.  You're pretty well covered by Evernote keeping your notes safe on their servers,  plus - if you're a subscriber - a 'Note History' feature that lets you restore the previous version of a note if content is accidentally deleted.  However this is your research,  being kept on someone else's computer system,  possibly in a different country.  The risk of loss or data corruption is low,  but not zero;  your choice whether to back up.  I've been around since forever,  and I do regular backups to ENEX files,  one per notebook.  

Backing up - exporting to ENEX or HTML - won't change what you see in your account;  you'll just have an extra file to keep safe somewhere just in case...

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005557  for more on this...

[PinkElephant 8,820]

Just a few more words: Note history is AFAIK running on all accounts - but to access it you need a subscription. Even Free users benefit from it, because if they run into a problem, they can subscribe for a month, sort it out and fall back again. Note history will cover changes, but it will not help if a note was entirely deleted (first moved into trash, and then removed from trash / the trash emptied). A deleted note takes note history with it.

Physically EN rents servers in Google data centers (that are very safe), with distributed copies. I think the probability to loose the entire cloud database is close to zero.

Personally I run backups on both my Mac and PC. These backups include the data folder of EN. So a full copy of the EN data is saved with my backups. I could restore from there, but not individual notes, just the whole account. To me this is enough as an ultimate safety net. I do not think it is necessary to run the export procedure with ENEX or HTML.  With v10 the export is not really practical to do on a regular basis.

[Sylvio 25]

Both answers here are great, so my response will hold very little overall informational value.

I don't see a reason you would need to back up. Evernote is secure and your notes are safely accessible through the web and Evernote apps. Should you choose to back up and have extra copies of your data, they will still remain intact online and on the applications.

[lost_gweedo 73]

I look at this from a cost (time) versus risk perspective.  The risk of losing your single notebook is very, very slim while the consequence of a loss are very high.  Since the time it takes to export a notebook onto a thumb drive is very low, it makes sense to sleep a little better at night.  

But, in the 3.5 inch floppy days, I lost a huge chunk of my thesis and had to redo so take the comment for what it's worth...

 

[PinkElephant 8,820]

Exporting is a brute force backup: No versioning, needs to be done manually. No versioning means you always need to export all data again, even if the largest part of it is unchanged. Manually means it relies on the discipline to be done over and again.

Better than not backing up at all, but not really how backups should be done. Good backup methods only save what has changed, allows to go back in time to older versions and run automatically in the background.