Best way to have a backup of all my notes ?

[Fred V. 55]

Hello,

after months/years of complaning about the new Evernote 10 on Mac, even if I'm still not happy with the changes, I have decided to forget about the Legacy version and switch to Evernote 10 only.

My worry is that, compared to Legacy, all my notes will be online now and I won't have a full cache of my notes on my Laptop.

What is the best, most secure way to make a backup of all notes ?  Are ENEX files still useful ? can I use EXEX for storing all my notebooks ? (I have 12000+ notes and GBs of data)

Does ENEX work with v10 ? on Mac and Windows ?

Is there an easy way to have local copies of all notes with the v10 version ? I know there is an option to keep data on Local when application is closed but I'm not sure it could synchronize all my notes. is it working ?

As you can see, I'm starting to understand Evernote with their unified tool on all platforms and web-based database but I'm so attached to my notes I would like to keep them on my laptop too

Thanks

[agsteele 2,945]

I think the best thing is to review how Evernote data is stored.  That will, I think, point you to the most up to date back up that is easiest to access being the Evernote servers. If they fail then your next option will be the local copy on your computer.  On Windows this is stored at %AppData%\Evernote\ . There is an equivalent location on MacOS. I understand that Time Machine should be backing this up routinely.

You can also save ENEX files.  In the Legacy days it was possible to select the option to backup all notes in one large ENEX file.  Whilst this is superficially interesting it suffers one major issue, the ENEX does not hold the notebook information.  So when used to restore notes they are all imported into one, single, large notebook.  You then have to manually recreate your notebook structure. The advice has long been to export each notebook as an ENEX.  You can do this with Evernote v10. At the moment you cannot export all your notes in a single ENEX file with Evernote v10. There is a limit of 50 notes per export although there is a config tweak that will allow you to increase this 1,000 notes (search the forums for config.json).

However, I'm assuming that your desire to have a backup is so that if Evernote was to fail then you could go elsewhere with your notes.  I think the big issue  here is which services will allow you to import from an ENEX.  I haven't explored these options.  I'm sure others have and will chime in. I know that in the past the one or two services I looked at actually transferred data by a direct connection to Evernote rather than through an ENEX import.  That, obviously, would not work if Evernote had ceased to exist.  But that would be true regardless of which software you might be using.

So, if you have a real need for the security of a physical backup to reassure you then the Time Machine backup is probably the way to go.  You can create the notebook ENEX files but this is a manual task.

For collapse of the service explore your options well in advance so that you know what you will need. However, I'm confident that in that scenario there would be a clamour to entice Evernote emigres by other note taking applications.