(Archived) How I use Evernote along with Dropbox

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I'm one of the few who, even with a premium account, find that I'm always running short of upload space. There are two ways I use Dropbox in conjunction with Evernote b/c of this.

The first way is with my iPhone (or could be any mobile device that has a Dropbox app), b/c I often use my phone as the source for many EN notes. (IE photos of things/events and/or voice memos when I'm out & about.) Since the way EN works is that if you create a 5 mb note, upload it, then add 1 mb to that same note & re-upload it, you've now consumed 11 mb of your monthly upload allowance, if I know I'm going to be editing a note with an attachment (since those take up more space than just plain text notes), I really don't want to send the photo/audio/movie directly to Evernote. I know I'm going to change the title & probably add some keywords. Maybe even merge a couple of the attachments into the same note. SO...I upload the file(s) from my phone to Dropbox. Later, when I'm at my desktop, I can build the note in a local notebook. When I'm done creating/editing/merging, I will then move the note to a sync'd notebook. This way, only the final note consumes part of my upload allowance.

The second use relates to offsite/cloud backups of my EN database. A byproduct of creating so many notes in EN is that my Evernote database (Windows client, although I also use the iPhone app & occasionally the web client) exceeds 5 gigs. It well exceeds 5 gigs. That's a magic number b/c my cloud backup app of choice is Jungle Disk. JD will not backup a file that exceeds 5 gigs. At least a few other backup/cloud services have file size limitations, too. (Yet another reason to love Evernote - your database can grow to more than a few gigs over time & the cost to you is either minimal or free!)

That means that I cannot backup my Evernote database (exb file) to Jungle Disk. This is problematic since I currently have a hundred or so notes that reside in local notebooks. Which means if I ever have a total loss (IE house burns down & everything in it is destroyed - God forbid!) I will lose those notes. Yes, I could have two portable drives (IE Western Digital Passports). I could keep one in my safe deposit box & swap them out each week. But we all know how that gig goes. Sometimes yes & most of the time, no. SO...I had to spring for a paid Dropbox account. I created a Truecrypted container in my Dropbox & regularly backup my EN database to that. Since I have to do this manually, it's not as reliable as nifty, automated backups. But it's the best I've got at this point.

[Owyn 457]

I use both as well. Whether I use Evernote or Dropbox depends on what I want to do.

e.g.

1)A music blog I follow was recently trashed by Blogger. The publisher had a WordPress backup which unfortunately only covered till Feb of this year. I noticed that I could still see the full blog text for all posts in my Google Reader Feed.

Solution: Created new shared Evernote notebook and use Chrome to clip the posts to that notebook. The clipper, set to preserve styles for text, did an excellent job of copying all the data including youtube links, etc. Sending the shared notebook url in an e-mail was all I had to do to get the data in the right hands.

2)My mother recently had her 100th birthday. In preparation for this I scanned a lot of photos which needed to be reviewed by various people.

Solution: Created a Dropbox Album to contain and export the scanned photos.

3)I wanted to remotely access my Calibre e-book library from Stanza on my Touch.

Solution: Moved the Calibre library to Dropbox Public. Added new shared library to Stanza config. This had the additional advantage of getting an offsite backup of the library.

4)I had a collection of code and scripts which I wanted to have available on any system/os instance I was working on. It was important that the relative folder and filename structures were consistent wherever I worked.

Solution: Moved the relevant folders to Dropbox Private.

etc.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

My mother recently had her 100th birthday.

Happy Birthday to Owyn's mother!!!

(100...WOW!)

[Owyn 457]

The second use relates to offsite/cloud backups of my EN database. A byproduct of creating so many notes in EN is that my Evernote database (Windows client, although I also use the iPhone app & occasionally the web client) exceeds 5 gigs. It well exceeds 5 gigs. That's a magic number b/c my cloud backup app of choice is Jungle Disk. JD will not backup a file that exceeds 5 gigs. At least a few other backup/cloud services have file size limitations, too. (Yet another reason to love Evernote - your database can grow to more than a few gigs over time & the cost to you is either minimal or free!)

You could compress your exb file before sending it to Dropbox.

e.g. My (relatively small) 274MB exb file compresses to 167MB.

I think you said you were using Windows 7 so you should not have a problem with the maximum size of the compressed file.

ZIP64

The original ZIP format had a 4 GiB limit on various things (uncompressed size of a file, compressed size of a file and total size of the archive), as well as a limit of 65535 entries in a ZIP archive. In version 4.5 of the specification (which is not the same as v4.5 of any particular tool), PKWARE introduced the "ZIP64" format extensions to get around these limitations increasing the limitation to 16 EiB (264 bytes). ZIP64 support is emerging. For example, the File Explorer in Windows XP does not support ZIP64, but the Explorer in Windows Vista does. Likewise, some libraries, such as DotNetZip and IO::Compress::Zip in Perl, support ZIP64. Java's built-in java.util.zip does not support it as of September 2010, but it has been added to OpenJDK and is planned for inclusion in Java 7.[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_(file_format)