Best way to export notes since free account is useless now?

[hyyen 8]

All the old export options that were discussed in old threads no longer seem to exist.

You have to export one note at a time it seems, print to PDF on Macs while using the web version.

You can select up to 100 notes and the only options are move or merge, no export to PDF.

Well you can't merge 100 notes, it becomes too big.  So I merged 10 notes and the results weren't good because several notes had JPGs embedded.

I don't even see an option to export in the ENEX format, if anything else would even use this format.

So I'm probably going to save maybe a couple dozen of my most recent notes.  My usage pattern is to use maybe 5-10% of my notes more than once and notes which are over 3-4 years old often have outdated info so not worth using or even reading again.  Maybe I can just cull all the old notes and get it down to under 50 for awhile.

But no doubt they will try to squeeze free account users more, because they're probably not getting more new users with the free account so limited.

 

[Dave Green 210]

Have you tried using the Mac desktop client — I think you get the ability to export a notebook at a time.

[gazumped 11,697]

8 hours ago, hyyen said:

squeeze free account users more

There's so much wrong with that statement...  how does one 'squeeze' someone who is taking advantage of a free service?  Evernote have decided they can no longer afford charity.  If you like and need the facilities,  please subscribe.  If you don't find them worthwhile,  please feel free to leave.

Exporting is only available from the desktop apps - where,  if you go to the notebooks tab,  you'll find that selecting the three-dots menu gives an export option for the whole notebook.  Your existing notes are  safe for now,  and you can edit or view them any time.  The only restriction on your activities being that if you have more than 50 notes,  you can't add more.

[hyyen 8]

Sorry I only meant it in the sense that their main path to get subscribers is to convert the free account users.

They've progressively taken away features for free accounts to make users have to upgrade to regain some of those features.

So that indicates that they're not getting many paying users who are new to Evernote so much as trying to convert those who are familiar with EN and getting them to pay.

That is the squeeze.

[PinkElephant 8,163]

What we see is obviously no growth strategy.

Its cutting away the dead cost to make the core of the business sustainable.

If you already have a business, neglecting your economics by only pushing for growth is a death strategy today. 

Money costs money these days, and burning money in the hope of creating new one out of the smoke is even more stupid than it was in the times when new capital was plentiful and cheap.

[gazumped 11,697]

1 hour ago, hyyen said:

they're not getting many paying users who are new to Evernote so much as trying to convert those who are familiar with EN and getting them to pay.

If you're new to Evernote -and in line with the usual "30 days free, then you pay" sort of scenario,  I'd have thought that 50 notes and 1 notebook is enough to work out whether Evernote does what you need.  If you need more space,  you pay.  And being tired of providing a free lunch for a whole group of unproductive non-subscribers, Evernote offered the option - pay up or go away.  They're not looking for conversions,  they're fixing a drain on their resources in the future.

[Paul A. 626]

On 12/15/2023 at 12:07 PM, gazumped said:

They're not looking for conversions,  they're fixing a drain on their resources in the future.

What makes you say that? I think it far more likely that the goal is to incentivize a significant number of free users to begin becoming paying customers. The ongoing costs to maintain a small amount of data for free subscribers is non-zero but it pales in comparison with the possibility of enrolling (e.g.) a million new subscribers in a $10/month plan. 

[hyyen 8]

Well I tried to export from the Mac version, couldn't log in.  I screwed up removing and adding devices and I can't try again until next month since it's now limited to 2 changes per month.

So I downloaded Obsidian for Mac and started converted several dozen of my most recent notes.  Most of them just have text and links so just copy and paste.

Obsidian doesn't have easy formatting options.  For instance, no underlining of fonts or selected text.  You can bold or italicize, can't change font sizes of just some text.

For embedded PDFs and graphics or photos, I had to download to my Mac and then dragged and dropped them into Obsidian for that note.

So pretty manual process but not too bad.

I have hundreds or thousands of notes since I've been using EN for probably a decade or more.  But I'm not going to bother with the 10 year old or even many of the notes older than a few years.  I rarely look at them.

I also had a bunch of notes generated by the old Evernote Dine app.  I loved using that but they got rid of it and I don't see the point in migrating the dozens of Dine notes I generated.  A lot of the restaurants no longer exist anyways.

I set up iCloud sync, which I'm already paying for.

If I used Obsidian Sync, it would cost me $8-10 a month so not much different than Evernote Personal account would cost.  So I set it up in iCloud Drive.  I pay 99 cents a month for 50 GB, which includes photos and backups of my iPhone and iPad.  Next tier up is 200 GB for $3 a month.  So like less than 1/3 of the Evernote Promotional prices of $130 for the first year, regularly $180 a year.

Again, I could afford to pay $180 but my notes are not for professional use and most of the notes I will never read, let alone edit./

The ONE thing EN would be useful for is searching PDFs.  But I think the Free EN accounts had that years ago, so I haven't been used to that capability for years.

iCloud at even $36, I could use it for far more things than syncing notes so easier to justify.

 

The Obsidian vaults are basically files and folders.  So very easy to back up and export.  Compare that to trying to export dozens or hundreds of notes out of Evernote, which is very difficult.

So that made me cull a lot of notes or orphan the older ones I probably will never read again.

Anyone looking to migrate, hope that this description of moving to Obsidian could be useful.

I searched for Evernote options and One Note always comes up.  But I don't want to have to deal with a Microsoft account, though I have one that I haven't used in awhile.  But a lot of options were suggested so good luck to others looking to migrate.

[PinkElephant 8,163]

If you try to switch devices, first log off on the one you want to shed. Then quit the client.

Now use "the other" device to unsync. Once you are at only one synced device showing in the devices tab, you can safely add a new one.

Most unsync/resync problems result from adding a third device before unsyncing from one of the others.

[jonash22 1]

On 12/15/2023 at 11:29 AM, gazumped said:

There's so much wrong with that statement...  how does one 'squeeze' someone who is taking advantage of a free service?  Evernote have decided they can no longer afford charity.  If you like and need the facilities,  please subscribe.  If you don't find them worthwhile,  please feel free to leave.

Exporting is only available from the desktop apps - where,  if you go to the notebooks tab,  you'll find that selecting the three-dots menu gives an export option for the whole notebook.  Your existing notes are  safe for now,  and you can edit or view them any time.  The only restriction on your activities being that if you have more than 50 notes,  you can't add more.

thats not true:

at the moment I can neither read nor edit or export my existing notes because I always get the message on all channels that I have reached my limit of synchronised devices and also the limit of possible deletions and would now have to pay to upgrade for at least 12 months. 

This is an absolute cheek and contradicts the company's own announcements in the blog entry dated 2023/11/29:

"In keeping with Evernote's 3 Laws of Data Protection, and to ensure that you retain full ownership of your data, any Free user who currently has more than fifty notes and one notebook will still be able to view, edit, export, share, and delete existing notes and notebooks." 

[gazumped 11,697]

9 hours ago, jonash22 said:

"In keeping with Evernote's 3 Laws of Data Protection, and to ensure that you retain full ownership of your data, any Free user who currently has more than fifty notes and one notebook will still be able to view, edit, export, share, and delete existing notes and notebooks." 

Provided they didn't already break the device limit and try to access the account from more than two?  I recommend you read the pop-up screens that warn you about the limits carefully - at the bottom of the screen is always an option to remove devices to continue access.

[s2sailor 2,226]

Considering the change to the free option Evernote should really consider dropping the device limit they have.  It makes no sense now and it causing numerous problems for folks trying to migrate away.

[PinkElephant 8,163]

Actually I would expect that a Free user knows how to handle this limit - it is still the same as it was. Today's handling is in place since October 2020, so 3 years of learning should be enough.

Instead of dedicating dev resources to code the Free limits out of the clients and server operation, I have more productive ideas for using the coding capacity.

[s2sailor 2,226]

19 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Actually I would expect that a Free user knows how to handle this limit - it is still the same as it was. Today's handling is in place since October 2020, so 3 years of learning should be enough.

Some (many?) of these users may not have been using desktop software that they now need to install to export and are now getting caught up in this.  Resulting in more support tickets.

BS is not shy about ripping out old code.  I think they will jump at the chance 😀.

[PinkElephant 8,163]

I really hope they get their QA up and running before they start to engage with "old" code again. BTW what is designated "old" code is likely 5-3 years old, or younger.

There is older code around that would be good to take care of.

[s2sailor 2,226]

2 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

I really hope they get their QA up and running before they start to engage with "old" code again.

Agreed.  Their tendency to have the user base test new code releases does tend to stress their support structure.

[PinkElephant 8,163]

We had a rule of thumb (I worked QM for quite some years): With every step in the process an error is allowed to pass, the inherited cost of fixing it is rising 10-fold. Even if it seems that with software this would not be true, if you put millions of downloads and fresh installs into the equation, I think it may actually be worse.

From what we have seen in the last few months in releases for ALL clients and platforms are bugs that tell that even the most basic core functionality has NEVER been tested before dumping the new code on the users.

If you want people to pay a Premium price for a product or service, you can't treat them as guinea pigs at the same time. I really wonder how long this will be going on.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,971]

1 hour ago, PinkElephant said:

We had a rule of thumb (I worked QM for quite some years): With every step in the process an error is allowed to pass, the inherited cost of fixing it is rising 10-fold. Even if it seems that with software this would not be true, if you put millions of downloads and fresh installs into the equation, I think it may actually be worse.

From what we have seen in the last few months in releases for ALL clients and platforms are bugs that tell that even the most basic core functionality has NEVER been tested before dumping the new code on the users.

One is tempted to make an analogy using German and Italian automobiles; but one refrains.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,971]

14 hours ago, jonash22 said:

at the moment I can neither read nor edit or export my existing notes because I always get the message on all channels that I have reached my limit of synchronised devices and also the limit of possible deletions and would now have to pay to upgrade for at least 12 months

Correction: it is always possible to subscribe for just 1 month for $15.