Mac Evernote Sync Status?

[The Cinematic Guy 6]

Hi,  I finally made the transition from the Legacy Mac Client to the New Evernote For Mac Client (v 10.74.1). 

 

I have over 60,000 notes and my database for the legacy database was about 220GB.  When I'm signed into the new client it says 'all changes are saved' but when I navigate to the database: /Users/jeff/Library/Application Support/Evernote it shows my database is 3.78GB.  I just signed in a few hours ago and the size doesn't seem to be growing unless I go into Evernote and load a note.  For example.  If I click on a note for the first time in this new client (and it's 120MB in size) once the note has finished downloading I can also see that the database in finder has grown by roughly the same amount.  How do I go about downloading EVERYTHING so that it is default saved for offline access.

 

I do have the setting 'keep a copy of my notes on this device at sign-out' but again it only appears to be saving notes that I've actually selected within the app for it to manually download one by one.  Why is the sync status gone and how do I force the new Evernote to actually download all of my content for truly offline use?  

 

I know this may be a question / answer post but it really is a feature request... because it seems like something fundamental; like an engine temperature gauge for your car.... 

 

Any help is appreciated.

[Boot17 1,473]

On 2/5/2024 at 10:43 PM, Boot17 said:

I just turned my network off and looked at -- or rather, tried to look at -- a bunch of old notes on MacOS Desktop Evernote. Most of them gave me this:

I'm not a big storage user -- maybe 6 GB is all as I keep a lot of my larger files in other cloud storage locations. So even at that little amount it's not all here. I last wiped and clean installed my local database well over several months ago and I'm always connected to the internet.

Just a follow up to this. I did an export recently of all my notebooks -- it took longer than expected and so I suspected that perhaps it was downloading a lot of content that wasn't yet downloaded so that it could then export them. (Edit: perhaps they were already downloaded and the export is just really slow -- maybe some meta data was broken in them or something and they were showing offline and the export cleared it...? who knows) 

A few days later, I turned my internet connection off and pulled up 20+ old notes in offline mode and all of them came up just fine -- no "Note unavailable" error message.

So now my answer to this part...

On 2/5/2024 at 6:31 PM, The Cinematic Guy said:

how do I force the new Evernote to actually download all of my content for truly offline use?

...of the question is: Try exporting them one notebook at a time using the Evernote app itself (don't use a 3rd party tool) to force Evernote to actually download all of them that aren't yet downloaded.

Easier for me as a tags-guy than a notebooks-guy since I only have four notebooks. (Also - side note: pretty cool that I could use the web app while the Desktop app was busy exporting.)

 

[Paul A. 631]

I'm curious to see what others say. I've seen people claim that Evernote v10 will eventually download a full copy of one's database, but that's not been my experience. Recently I took a plane flight and the WiFi was out-of-order. I was only able to open notes I've opened in recent months. Notes that I tried to open which happened to be older than a year did not open / were not available.

[PinkElephant 8,189]

My observation was it may be slow in downloading, but it finally does. It will only download while the client is open, can be in the background.

You can always cut the internet connection and try. If it consistently does not download, contact support (for what it’s good …).

 

[Boot17 1,473]

I just turned my network off and looked at -- or rather, tried to look at -- a bunch of old notes on MacOS Desktop Evernote. Most of them gave me this:

I'm not a big storage user -- maybe 6 GB is all as I keep a lot of my larger files in other cloud storage locations. So even at that little amount it's not all here. I last wiped and clean installed my local database well over several months ago and I'm always connected to the internet.

Cloud providers generally charge money for data egress. Wiping all the data and then redownloading all the data (especially when that's a common fix suggested in the forums) sounds expensive for Evernote -- especially when we are talking sizes like 220 GB.

 

[s2sailor 2,251]

Our assumption is that it is or should be downloading all our notes.  Other than comparing storage used and thinking that looks close to what I expect, we really don’t know for certain.  I wish they would add the download indicators to the desktop versions that they have in the mobile apps.

[PinkElephant 8,189]

Download Staus on Desktop is not transparent at the moment. 

What I do to get a hint: I have full downloads on my iOS devices. I compare the app data size there with the desktop folder size. It‘s close enough in my case to believe I have it all.

A second thing with unavailable content may be the conversion between old syncing and RTE syncing. But as users we can’t really tell.

And support is … unsupportive. With many answers on tickets I doubt they have even read (or understood) the question asked / the issue reported.

[Paul A. 631]

2 minutes ago, Boot17 said:

So now my answer to this question...

On 2/5/2024 at 5:31 PM, The Cinematic Guy said:

how do I force the new Evernote to actually download all of my content for truly offline use?

is: Try exporting them one notebook at a time using the app (don't use a 3rd party tool) to force Evernote to actually download all of them that aren't yet downloaded.

Great find / suggestion. I've been thinking of doing a notebook consolidation project as a while back I started putting all new notes into a single notebook with tags, but I have a bunch of old notebooks that I need to consolidate. I may give this a try once I'm done with that.

Side question, as a primarily tags user, how do you divide up your four notebooks? I was thinking it might make sense to have a couple of notebooks so that one notebook doesn't get too big (might also make exporting easier / more reliable), but I'm still thinking of logical ways to divide up my notes.

[PinkElephant 8,189]

There used to be an option to split the ENEX files into chunks. But you can’t do it by tags or any other selection.

Once you leave full notebook export and move to any selection, you are capped at 100 notes per export.

There used to be a workaround that allowed up to roughly 1.000 notes in a selection. But since it will be overwritten by each new release, I didn’t apply it any more.

I use the GitHub backup project to keep my notes available „just in case“.

[Boot17 1,473]

@Paul A.

My four notebooks are:

• Personal
• Personal Blob
• Work
• Work Blob

The 'Blob' notebooks just contain any notes that are greater than roughly 5 to 10 MB as I don't want those taking up a large amount of space on my mobile devices. If there was one I wanted to be offline regardless of size, I'd just move it to the corresponding non-blob notebook. It just makes it easier to manage what is available offline on my mobile.

Tags for me double as "notebooks" (subject or project name for example) and as things that people think of traditionally with tags like WIP. 

[The Cinematic Guy 6]

Update:

so if Evernote is running (the Mac client) while on the internet you get no sync status.  Buuuutttt.... if you have Evernote running and turn off wifi/ disconnect from ethernet... (you get an offline notification menu bar at the top) and then if you re-connect to the internet you will now get a sync status  in a banner at the top of the application (see screenshot).  I have surmised that this is NOT a glitch or oddity because this occurs on multiple Macs as well as with other Evernote users I know who did the same testing.

Questions:

1.  Why is the sync indicator banner only present after you've lost internet? (if I do the steps above and get the sync banner and then close Evernote and relaunch while connected to the internet the banner disappears- so I've surmised from multiple computers and multiple Evernote accounts that the Sync Banner is only visible after a network disconnect, and only until you close the application).

2.  Why is no technical information provided on any level for the sync status?  A progress bar, a percentage amount, an amount of MB data remaining to sync, or even the number of notes left to sync before the client is up to date would be immensely helpful.  Heck even a crude pie chart progress indicator would be better than nothing.

 

This seems like a major oversight for the GUI to be lacking such basic functionality.  I assume their goal is for Evernote to be 'seamless' but for a power user like me who may use multiple devices and have lots to sync it's VERY irritating to not have a sync status.  

This lack of feature is enough of a pain in my side that I'm considering leaving Evernote.  That may sound absurd and an over reaction but is not more absurd than a premium product and service missing such a fundamental feature that existed in the old client.

[PinkElephant 8,189]

The old client is no measure. The new one isn’t one either.

EN has a nice set of indicators already in use on the mobile clients, to signal sync and offline download status. I could imagine they simply roll them out to desktop as well.

[The Cinematic Guy 6]

Good points.  I am using the latest and greatest releases of EN for mac exclusively and yes they should (I cannot fathom why such a basic mechanic- that’s ubiquitous on competing products and services- would missing on Evernote for Mac….

 

I could understand if the new version (now the current and only version) was in beta but since they just ended service for the classic client they have very clearly stated that the current version is the gold standard and it’s missing functions that existed for over a decade on the old version.

 

Unacceptable; plain and simple.

[s2sailor 2,251]

4 minutes ago, The Cinematic Guy said:

Unacceptable; plain and simple.

I’m on a Mac too and I haven’t noticed a sync status on their mail client either.  The assumption is that it just works.  That said, I would like to see an indicator like what is used on the mobile clients as well.