Viewing EN Note Sizes (MB) to Enable Identification of Large Notes

[david_woznyorg 8]

Hello,
I'm an EN fan on Windows, iPad & Android. Sometimes when I get into problems with syncs, I've needed to delete the app / data, then re-installed and re-synchronised. I was recently amazed by a message that said I had something like 2GB of data -  I didn't imagine I would have such a big footprint.

Is there a way to display the size in MB of my notebooks and / or notes (preferably in a list), as I imagine I have a few rogue notes which I ought to identity and prune.

Thanks, David

[gazumped 11,652]

Hi.  Where's your 2GB footprint (which device,  Evernote client) and how many notes does it report you have?  Do you save a lot of images?

[david_woznyorg 8]

Hi,

I think the 2GB footprint was on my iPad - I always update to the latest client.

I only have 3,200 notes. I have some saved images for sure, but don't know an easy way to identify them, so that I could then potentially delete them.

Thanks, David

[gazumped 11,652]

Hmmn.  As you've probably found,  uninstalling the app should clear off any saved data - your notes aren't stored on your iPad permanently,  the 'reference' version of all notes is on the server.  All you get on the iPad is work in progress - unless you set one or more notebooks to be available offline,  when they would be saved to the device.

2GB does seem extreme for temporary data,  but I don't use Apple stuff so I don't know whether that's an issue.  Others around here are users,  so you'll probably get more thoughts from them.  Short term - easy fix - just uninstall / restart the tablet to clear the memory / reinstall - and check again.  Unless it's causing another issue,  you can probably forget about it.

If you want to find notes with images / PDF files and the like,  it is possible:  you may need this.  Use advanced search syntax

[david_woznyorg 8]

Thanks for the advanced search tip - I will look into that.

I was hoping there was something akin to the Windows (File) Explorer view, where you can see choose to display the size / date of a file, and sort by it if so desired. I do recognise that because it's easy in Windows, it doesn't follow that it is 'do-able' in EN.

Cheers, David

[gazumped 11,652]

If you have access to your account on desktop there are a few more tricks available - look at the Side List view,  and right click the 'Title...' menu bar.  There's a drop-down list of options you might enjoy...

[Mike P 2,625]

1 hour ago, gazumped said:

There's a drop-down list of options you might enjoy...

but sadly you can't sort on the size of the note.

[PinkElephant 8,075]

My question is if pruning the data volume is really an important activity. 

On mobile it downloads the data needed to find notes and work with them. But large attachments are NOT loaded, they will be downloaded only on demand. So pruning the large notes will do nothing to reduce the data volume stored on mobile devices.

On mobile it is possible to download notebooks for offline use. Since it can be done per notebook, it is possible to avoid downloading a volume that the device can‘t take. Or you do as I do: When I buy a device, I have in mind that I will download 35GB of notes. So I won‘t shop for the smallest sized iPad memory, because it has value for me to have my notes offline.

On desktop everything will be downloaded, or nothing. Desktop devices are easier to upgrade in their memory, so I don‘t see reducing the EN storage as a key issue. In case the system drive will not do, use a symbolic link (sym link) to install the EN database on another drive.

[gazumped 11,652]

17 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

My question is if pruning the data volume is really an important activity. 

I agree that any serious effort to reduce the footprint of the database is pretty much wasted time - the upload has already happened,  and as you say;  a mobile device won't have to store any unnecessary large files.  File size is sometimes useful for note comparisons and as a reminder not to get too close to the note limit.  I'm assuming the OP's iPad reading was mainly temporary storage.

[david_woznyorg 8]

You're both right that I shouldn't be too bothered about the EN footprint on my mobile devices. I guess it's hard to get out of the habit of wanting to prune away my unexpectedly large EN notes based upon a 20MB PDF, or being alarmed that after merging several image notes they came to 30MB.

I will have to learn to 'chill out'. 🙄

[PinkElephant 8,075]

Some of us remember the days when „a lot of RAM“ meant 640kB. For the younger generation among us: That means 640 kilobyte, and is 1/1000th of 640 MB or 1/12.000th of the 8 GB that today are the usual answer to the question „How much RAM is needed as a bare minimum to smoothly run a Win11 computer with some office and browsing“. (OK, you guys, it is not 1/1000th, it is 1/1024th, spare the comments). So we may be really trained to watch out for „large“, memory consuming files.

Luckily with EN we only pay for the upload bandwidth, not for the total storage used on the server, which means we don’t need to count every byte. I rarely consume my 10GB of monthly upload, so I really don’t reflect about if I am moving the equivalent of a library set of books over the wire, which is the case even with saving a few picture files from my iPhone.

Maybe we should care more (in terms of sustainability), but still I think there are better ways to invest a limited human life span than to permanently weed out data we once held valuable.

[idoc 400]

On 9/30/2022 at 9:47 AM, gazumped said:

If you have access to your account on desktop there are a few more tricks available - look at the Side List view,  and right click the 'Title...' menu bar.  There's a drop-down list of options you might enjoy...

This was an incredibly useful tip.  I used this to find all of my large notes and then simply moved them into Gdrive in various ways.  I literally took gigs of useless data out of Evernote and archived it elsewhere.  It also alerted me to all sorts of sloppy ways of saving pdf files which result in unneccessarily huge files instead of using Acrobat to condense them 10X.  For example, dozens of travel related documents that were over 100 MB each which were easily condensed down to 5MB.

[PinkElephant 8,075]

Translations for Mac users: Skip the Adobe Acrobat part (I mean avoid this investment banker driven cutthroat company with an attached alibi coding department). You can do the same using the Preview app preinstalled courtesy of Apple on your Mac. Just save the pdf optimized to cut down file size.

Or use a scanner or scanning app that does its own Adaption of file sizes to readability. My ix500 with ScanSnap Manager for example produces a pdf file from 50 receipts, nicely scanned, all fully OCRed that will just take up 25 MB. You need to play a little with scanning settings to achieve a good result with smallish file sizes, but it can be done.

[idoc 400]

I also use the incredibly wonderful  fujitsu scan snap (i own 4 of them) but i still rely heavily on Acrobat. It may be rapacious but i really haven’t found any better (and I’ve looked hard).