Exporting 3000 notes what's the work around?

[mikefinleyco 57]

Trying to export over 3000 notes for a back up, is a very long time consuming and tedious process limited to 100 notes at a time, is there a workaround for this to make it easier?

[agsteele 3,069]

The most often recommended is the evernote-backup routine which is available from GitHub.

It's well discussed so you can find more details in the forums. But Google will point you on the right direction.

[mikefinleyco 57]

Git hub looks way complicated, I'm not a programmer is that the only solution?

[agsteele 3,069]

It's the only solution that I've found that works. Actually it really isn't very difficult. I'm not a programmer either. I just followed the instructions provided using the Windows installer. Ignore all the advice on how to build your own program.

[agsteele 3,069]

BTW. Don't forget you can export unlimited numbers of notes when you export a notebook. So my guess is that you have fewer than to notebooks so if you persist with the manual export exploring each notebook is likely to be quicker than batches of 100 notes.

[mikefinleyco 57]

Thanks, I wasn't aware of the unlimited numbers of notes when you export a notebook.

 

Unfortunately I probably average 20 notes per note book.

Does this apply to a stack? If I could export all the notebooks in a stack at the same time that would be great, for instance one stack has 30 notebooks with 1200 notes all together.

[s2sailor 2,504]

51 minutes ago, mikefinleyco said:

Does this apply to a stack?

No, only per notebook.

[VincentC 386]

A little math just for entertainment...  3,000 notes divided by 100 notes per, means 30 batches of exports to get through them all.  Let's assume it takes two minutes per batch of 100 (it's probably much faster).  That's an hour.  Add in trips to the coffee pot, the biology breaks which inevitably follow coffee -- say another half hour.

I know it's repitive, but that's 90 minutes total, no?  For me, going down the rabbit hole of making the github application work will take longer than that.  So, if it's a one-time thing, I would wait for a time when I was tired of using my brain, sit at the computer with coffee or an adult beverage, and export 100 at a time.

Alternatively, you could think about consolidating the notes you want to export into fewer notebooks and then take advantage of @agsteele's suggestion... but then there's a hundred note limit on moving notes too.  

 

Vinnie

[mikefinleyco 57]

2 hours ago, VincentC said:

A little math just for entertainment...  3,000 notes divided by 100 notes per, means 30 batches of exports to get through them all.  Let's assume it takes two minutes per batch of 100 (it's probably much faster).  That's an hour.  Add in trips to the coffee pot, the biology breaks which inevitably follow coffee -- say another half hour.

I know it's repitive, but that's 90 minutes total, no?  For me, going down the rabbit hole of making the github application work will take longer than that.  So, if it's a one-time thing, I would wait for a time when I was tired of using my brain, sit at the computer with coffee or an adult beverage, and export 100 at a time.

Alternatively, you could think about consolidating the notes you want to export into fewer notebooks and then take advantage of @agsteele's suggestion... but then there's a hundred note limit on moving notes too.  

 

Vinnie

It takes much longer than that, much longer. It's not a one time thing unless you trust evernote's servers which of course I don't (and evernote doesn't even recommend you do) and why there is a need to back up.

 

Some background - evernote's continuous updates that you can't opt out of just screwed up evernote on my laptop. Now it's a long process of discovery of what steps to take to fix it, which likely involves a compete wipe using a 3rd party app as recommended by evernote (WTF???) to remove every little trace of anything evernote on your computer, but first they recommend backing up all your notes. So that's almost 3/4 of day, then I still get to trail and error to see if I can get evernote uninstalled and re-installed and working again. All of course due to evernote's update.

So not fun

 

In the words of Magan Vernon - when evernote is good, its really good and when it's bad, it's really really bad.

 

[Dave Green 278]

5 hours ago, mikefinleyco said:

and evernote doesn't even recommend you do

Where does Evernote make a statement about not trusting their servers? I do back up because I believe in backups, but I have not seen Evernote make such a statement.  

My backups (and I think most, if not all, backup approaches) don't preserve note links.

[PinkElephant 8,994]

Backup is explicitly mentioned as a motivation here:

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005557-Export-notes-and-notebooks-as-ENEX-or-HTML

Installing the GitHub solution took me 15 minutes. It takes longer to run the first backup, because it’s a full backup, pulled through the API. It produces a set of ENEX files, by notebooks, when asked to do so.

Note links break because they point to the UUID of the original notes. When notes are imported again, they get a different UUID.

[VincentC 386]

As far as I can remember, I've only needed to uninstall / reinstall once, a couple of years ago.  Maybe I've been lucky? 

I'm not overly worried about backing up my notes on Evernote's database.  Anything super-critical I have elsewhere, which is backed up.  The chance of a complete and total failure on their end strikes me as vanishingly small.  Failures that cost me a few notes, while more likely, would be inconvenient but not disastrous.

But that's my calculation.  I have only admiration for others with different assessments who do implement the Github solution or other backup strategies.

 

Vinnie

[Feitz 278]

Who in his right mind set the select limit to 100 notes anyway?

Before Legacy was shut down I exported all my then 22000 notes into ENEx Files and then added an 'export0324' tag to ALL 22000 notes in one go.

This way I know which notes have been added since the last export (which is about 1000). 

Now in V10 I can identify these with a filter but have to split a new export into 10x100 notes and then have to readd another tag 100 notes at a time.

This is beyond ridiculous, sorry. Whoever did this does not use V10 at all.

[PinkElephant 8,994]

Initially it was a limit of 50. Fifty, for those who think I might have misspelled it by a „0“ or two.

And imagine ?

It‘s more than enough, maybe except a handful of occasions a year.

You can detect who belongs to the dead horse cavalry, and who were the scouts into v10 country. The dead horsers know nothing about a 50 notes limit, that is.

These feeble hearted fellows think the sky will fall with a comfy 💯 as selection limit 🤣

[Feitz 278]

29 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

The dead horsers know nothing about a 50 notes limit, that is.

Well, I expected this nonsensical limit would have fallen 4 yrs. into V10, but no, the moved it up to 100. Bravo.

At this pace we will be reach the 1000 notes limit in 80 years. 

If you are used to working with tags effectively (as you should with Evernote) you will notice 100 is NOT enough.

[PinkElephant 8,994]

It's not nonsensical. I upped it to nearly 1.000 with a little hack (that seems to have stopped working), and it was - glacial.

It syncs every single change with the server, before touching the next. The only way (and this was significantly faster) was to take the client offline, and perform the multi note operation then. In this case it doesn't sync right away.

So either to protect the user from himself, or the server from too many users doing multi note at the same time, somebody thought a little cap would work wonders.

[Feitz 278]

On 7/14/2024 at 1:03 AM, PinkElephant said:

So either to protect the user from himself, or the server from too many users doing multi note at the same time, somebody thought a little cap would work wonders.

Well, in Legacy changing 22000 notes tags did take a couple of minutes, but why would shiny new V10 have to sync all notes at all when only the metadata of these notes  is changed?

Even with a lot of tags changed that should not put any unreasonable stress on the servers.

Edit: without the presence of folders using tags as the main organizational means has always been suggested and when you use tags you need to select more notes.

[Fabulous Filing Friends 3]

How do I export a whole notebook?

[Feitz 278]

3 hours ago, Fabulous Filing Friends said:

How do I export a whole notebook?

right-click on the notebook -> export

[PinkElephant 8,994]

…. on a desktop client. Not available on web client or on mobile.

[mikefinleyco 57]

On 7/12/2024 at 7:38 PM, Dave Green said:

Where does Evernote make a statement about not trusting their servers? I do back up because I believe in backups, but I have not seen Evernote make such a statement.  

 

In the help page to fix the problem, you need to uninstall evernote, download a 3rd party app to totally cleanse your computer of any remnants of evernote, then reinstall evernote. Evernote clearly states they recommend you to back up your files locally before doing any of this. They clearly don't trust their own servers if they warn you to do a back up locally. 

It's basically good basic safety no matter what service, app, website whatever you are using to back up your own files no matter what they say. They can say you'll never need your own back up right up to the day they say oops we lost everything.

[mikefinleyco 57]

On 7/13/2024 at 10:57 AM, VincentC said:

As far as I can remember, I've only needed to uninstall / reinstall once, a couple of years ago.  Maybe I've been lucky? 

I'm not overly worried about backing up my notes on Evernote's database.  Anything super-critical I have elsewhere, which is backed up.  The chance of a complete and total failure on their end strikes me as vanishingly small.  Failures that cost me a few notes, while more likely, would be inconvenient but not disastrous.

But that's my calculation.  I have only admiration for others with different assessments who do implement the Github solution or other backup strategies.

 

Vinnie

I've uninstalled and reinstalled so many times I've lost count. 

I use evernote on 2 desktops, 1 lap top and 2 cell phones. The more you use it and the more complexly you use it the more chances for it top puke once in awhile.

 

I just had to reinstall on my desktop 2 days ago, all notes were perfectly synced on the laptop, 1 desktop and 2 phones, my main desktop for whatever reason some notes I was finding in a folder after they had been move to trash, they were still in the trash but also in the original notebook. Here is the fun part - when I went to delete one again moving it to trash it would delete that note and the first note alphabetically in the notebook along with it. 🙄  Very lucky I noticed this happening.

After about an hour of trying to mess with it, I finally got things to work again by double clicking to open the note that was supposed to be in the trash so it was in its own window, I then moved it to trash again and now it would finally delete it from the original folder and not delete any other note along with it. Why was this working while no other way allowed me to delete it without evernote deleting another note in the notebook, I have no idea, but that's why you back up, you never know what evernote is going to do to you, especially with them automatically updating you now.

At this same time, now this was even more interesting, the note that was in the trash if you opened it, it showed the contents of a completely different note. Talk about making you nervous about what was going to happen next??!!

So evernote only works until it doesn't and the more you use it the more chances you have of it eventually doing something nasty. So be warned. If you trust evernote's servers as the holy grail that will protect your data, it's only a matter of time before you find out differently. Anything important needs to be backed up and evernote should make this a simple process.

 

If anything they should at least offer a full back up on their servers that you can download in a zip file to keep locally.

[mikefinleyco 57]

On 7/13/2024 at 1:48 AM, PinkElephant said:

 

Note links break because they point to the UUID of the original notes. When notes are imported again, they get a different UUID.

That's great to know, I'll stop using that feature now since it's a waste of time once you have to restore anything from a back up 🙄 😣 WTF evernote!

[mackid1993 1,472]

If you are on Windows download the evernote-backup.exe file.

https://github.com/vzhd1701/evernote-backup/releases/tag/v1.9.3

You can use my batch scripts to quickly export everything. I've tried to simplify them for you to make it as user friendly as possible.

First download the Windows version and save it to the root of your c:\ drive.

Open a command prompt and type

cd \

Then type:

evernote-backup init-db

follow the prompts to sign into Evernote.

Copy and paste this into a text file called export.bat

evernote-backup sync 
evernote-backup export %userprofile%\Desktop

Either run the commands manually (copy and paste) or save the batch file in c:\ alongside evernote-backup.exe and double click it.

This will download your notes and export enex files for each notebook.

[Dave Green 278]

6 hours ago, mikefinleyco said:

Evernote clearly states they recommend you to back up your files locally before doing any of this. They clearly don't trust their own servers if they warn you to do a back up locally.

If you have a URL, I would appreciate it if you would provide it.  I am curious as to whether you are being instructed to backup your local system or the Evernote files from the server with either a backup program (as just described) or through exporting each notebook.

This statement is likely to "protect" against the cleaning operations breaking your system, not because they don't trust their servers, although I'll read the page.  I believe that once you start the cleaning process, with or without a backup of your local filesystem, you can only faithfully restore your Evernote data via the servers.

The servers' download will not recover everything (for example, the links between notes) and, last time I checked, the program to download from Evernote did not restore tasks.