(Archived) how to backup my Evernotes?

[disconnekt 0]

Yesterday my kid was playing around with my keyboard and actually managed to type a bunch of stuff into one of my notes (or at least I hope only one). Since EN syncs automatically between all my devices, her changes were synced. What I don't know is how many notes she messed with, or if she actually deleted any information. All this led me to wonder how can I make sure my notes are all safe in case of a situation like this? I don't have a premium account, so my notes aren't available offline, which I understand as meaning that EN doesn't store local copies of notes. I'm suddenly feeling worried....

[evermullah 8]

Time Machine was mentioned, but not the details: if you have it enabled, it takes a snapshot of any changed files every hour (for the last 24 hours). Beyond that, it keeps daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for anything older (until your backup disk fills up).

So if Time Machine is working, you should be able to go to ~/Library/Application Support/Evernote/ and retrieve the unaltered files.

i need some more details here. (just in case, the worst case comes up).

if timemachine backed up all the folders which are used by EN, and i start TM and move to the ~/Library/Application Support/Evernote/ folder,

i see this:

how should anybody know where to locate the "unaltered files" ?

also, restoring a file would not update the internal EN-database, i guess.

a more better question to the support-crew would be:

is EN compatible to TM? or will it just do a backup, which is only good for a complete system-restore, not only a restore of some notes?

[evermullah 8]

So if you want to restore from a Time Machine backup, you should disable synchronization (or all networking) while you recover and Export the notes.

thanks!

i was assuming this, but wasnt sure about it.

now, we need to make clear, what notebooks will sync, even if the syncronization is set to "manually" (turned off),

and which not.

it seems, that there are differences between the properties of the notebooks that are affected by the syncronization settings.

Its a pitty, that links were not migrated from the old to the new forum :-)

[markcrusey 0]

Evernote database is the very important for the business but when u loss than u use the carbonite for the online backup.By using this u also get ur business big data.By using carbonite u get the data from online recovery of the backup files.I buy the licence version of this software for my business data back up.

[evermullah 8]

So if you want to restore from a Time Machine backup, you should disable synchronization (or all networking) while you recover and Export the notes.

thanks!

i was assuming this, but wasnt sure about it.

now, we need to make clear, what notebooks will sync, even if the syncronization is set to "manually" (turned off),

and which not.

it seems, that there are differences between the properties of the notebooks that are affected by the syncronization settings.

[engberg 89]

If you restore your entire Evernote database on your Mac to an earlier state, and then you synchronize again, it will immediately update your old database to match what you see on the web. I.e. it would treat it just the same as if it were an old computer that you hadn't run for a while, and update it to match the service.

So if you want to restore from a Time Machine backup, you should disable synchronization (or all networking) while you recover and Export the notes.

[evermullah 8]

To restore, you should restore the entire "Evernote" directory without going into it.

If your local file system was corrupted, you could either restore the entire thing from a Time Machine backup, or just throw it all away and resync it from the service.

i have another question:

if i (or a kid...) deleted *and* updated some notes from my EN-mac-client by accident and restored them via a TM-restore.

what will happen to the deleted *and* updated notes (which are hopefully untouched inside the backup), if the EN-client had already synced to the server?

will the just restored notes be deleted and updated again on the EN-client, so that i need to unplug my internet-cable first after (or better before) the restore?

[engberg 89]

The files on disk are not set up to be individually managed by users, since there are relationships between a CoreData database and some of the folders and files that you won't be able to cleanly handle.

If your local file system was corrupted, you could either restore the entire thing from a Time Machine backup, or just throw it all away and resync it from the service. (The latter solution assumes you don't have any Local-only notebooks.)

[disconnekt 0]

Thanks to everyone who chimed in. I do have 2 computers in addition to 2 mobile devices that I use with EN. I also use Time Machine. However, in the case of a kid messing around on my Mac, I can't be sure which note(s) may have been edited or deleted—thanks to EN's very cryptic way of storing the database. Any suggestions?

[engberg 89]

If you want to back up your data with TimeMachine, just back up your whole "home" directory, and all of Evernote's stuff will be backed up as well. This works very well.

To restore, you should restore the entire "Evernote" directory without going into it.

[RobLewis 26]

Time Machine was mentioned, but not the details: if you have it enabled, it takes a snapshot of any changed files every hour (for the last 24 hours). Beyond that, it keeps daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for anything older (until your backup disk fills up).

So if Time Machine is working, you should be able to go to ~/Library/Application Support/Evernote/ and retrieve the unaltered files.

[jefito 5,589]

Thanks for filling that in, jbenson2 -- I didn't dig in and do the actual searches to back up my recollections (always a dangerous thing).

~Jeff

[jbenson2 2,147]

Some comments from Dave on other posts:

If you downgrade from Premium to Free, all of your existing notes stay as they are, but you can't add new resources of the non-Free type or make changes to the existing Resources.

As long as you keep the original Notes in Evernote, you'll be able to search them there. (New PDFs you add when you downgrade to Free won't be searchable, of course.)

[jefito 5,589]

Ultimately this is a Dave question, but I believe that Evernote won't throw away your notes or restrict your access to them if you lapse from Premium to freemium. Searching PDF files I am not sure of; I don't see the search index information when I export to .enex format, but I'd be surprised if this was disabled.

~Jeff

[Scooter 11]

Does Evernote save all notes even when not preimum and just deny access to them? In other words, could a solution be pay $5 for a month, retrieve your wrecked file, then let the account expire?

For that matter, if I have a premium account and have imported a bunch of pdf files, then let the account expire, do I lose the ability to search them? Or am I only paying for the initial scan then I get to keep the metadata even after my account expires?

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I backup my local EN database daily. I'm PC so can't tell you how but AFAIK, most Mac users use Time Machine for backups.

In addition to what Pitamakan said, if you have a premium account and the notes were in a sync'd notebook, you can access the note history feature.

[Pitamakan 2]

Just a note that EN's desktop Windows and Mac clients DO store copies of all of your notes locally, even for free users ... it's only the mobile clients that don't. Of course, that local data is updated every time there's a sync.

So if you have EN installed on two computers, and an unwanted data change is made on one of them, you'll still have the pre-change data on the other computer until the other computer syncs. So you might be able to recover the earlier data by disconnecting the second computer from the internet before turning it on, and then starting it up and immediately doing an EN export.

[jbenson2 2,147]

Yes, you should backup your Evernote on a regular basis. I use Carbonite to back anything whenever there is a change.

But the bigger problem is letting children play with your computer on an unsupervised basis.