Is there a way to export what were local notebooks after forced update? Legacy OSX user who just wants her locally stored data

[Candi_MI 1]

Hoping someone can help. I've used Evernote since 2011, just as a free program since I used it on a Macbook with local notebooks only. Nothing synced to the cloud. I just used it for papercrafting database... ie I had a notebook for "stamps" for instance and it would be full of notes each one with the name of a physical stamp set I own, a photo, some card examples, and tags based on images on that set. I had similar for metal cutting dies, embossing folders, you get the idea. Each with up to close to 1000 notes. All stored locally on my macbook and backed up manually to a storage drive. The problem is we moved this past year so I wasn't good about updating my backups and exporting my .enex files. I went to use the program this past week to finally add in some new supplies to my database and do an export/backup and I had a popup that I HAD to update to use the program, I even tried cutting my wifi but I couldn't access my notebooks or do anything but click update. I made a backup of my local evernote folder from my system library and went ahead to install the updated version hoping it would give me a chance to export my local data at least.... it didn't. All my hundreds & hundreds of notes are missing from Evernote now. I know they still exist on my hardrive but how on earth can I access them to export as something another program could read? 

Thank you for reading & offering any advice!

[gazumped 11,709]

As I recall (I'm not a Mac person),  Mac files were stored locally more or less in plain language.  If you can search your system for some likely keywords,  you may be able to locate the files.  Evernote did offer an option to convert local notebooks to online storage,  but I don't know how to trigger that - maybe a colleague here will be able to suggest more.  I do suggest you raise this with Support who also will be able to help - but they seemed pretty busy recently.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/requests/

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,979]

@Candi_MI, did you say you backed up everything to .enex files? If so, you can import them into the new Evernote app that you've got. File menu, then import. Hopefully that will recover everything. It will all now be synced to Evernote's cloud servers, since the new version does not work with local, unsynced notebooks. If you want to maintain that, you'll likely need to re-export to PDF or HTML files and find a different system for managing them.

[PinkElephant 8,188]

Just a warning: Export to HTML will only export the note (and pictures), but no attachments. If there are attachments in the local notebooks, you need to export to HTML to be able to open them using standard browsers.

@gazumped Searching for the files sounds good, but it won't work, at least on more modern MacOS. The search on the Mac is called Spotlight. Spotlight does not index the folders holding the EN database and files. One can manually locate the folder, and move the content, but searching where it is is not possible.

If I remember it correctly (I dumped legacy a while ago) the files were quite readable with Preview, but the file names were computer generated, not telling anything about content.