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(Archived) How much do multiple, large PDFs affect Evernote's speed and performance?


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I've been using Evernote for several years now, and I'm currently around 60k notes. A very small portion of those notes, currently around 250, contain rather large PDFs of journals, books and other assorted things I do editing and copy work on, as well as teaching notes and things like that. On average, they're about 100-500 pages. There are all manner of other things in there, but those are the only ones I'd consider out of the ordinary compared to what I see most people putting into Evernote.

I've been having many issues with Evernote syncing and performing across the Windows and iOS platforms for a while now, which I've been in contact with support about. A large volume of my work ends up revolving around PDF content, but I'm hesitant to put more of it into Evernote with all the issues I've been experiencing.

Can anyone else speak to how PDFs, particularly large ones that are essentially books, affect the performance of Evernote for them? Or any other issues you've ran into with having a large account like mine? When it's working, Evernote's actually still nimble and agile, all things considered. The main issues I've been having all seem to revolve around syncing, and on the iOS platforms, downloading offline notebooks, as well as getting many a 'timed out' error when trying to access a number of the online notes. Search actually works pretty well, despite what you'd expect with that volume of content.

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Hi. I have about 1/10 the number of notes, but several hundred I would guess are PDFs of varying lengths, many of them quite close to the 50mb upload limit. I have had no syncing or searching problems.

The search could be quick if it didn't start searching as soon as I begin typing a search query (about the third character into it), because that slows everything down to a crawl. It is a horrible lag that I know others have experienced as well. If they would turn off the immediate searching and wait until I hit the button (as it does on the iPad), then I would be much happier. I'm sure this lag has something to do with the number of notes I have, but I doubt PDFs are affecting it much.

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I have a much smaller database of around 7K notes. I do have several reference books with 300+ pages, though I don't know what percentage of the total that would be. For the record I've had no issues with syncing or searching (that I'm aware of) apart from my desktop client usage showing higher than the web/ mobile figure.

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If they would turn off the immediate searching and wait until I hit the button (as it does on the iPad), then I would be much happier.

+1!

to OP, I think pdf can really slow your searches. Thats why I removed all my pdfs from my stacks or convert them into images.

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If they would turn off the immediate searching and wait until I hit the button (as it does on the iPad), then I would be much happier.

+1!

to OP, I think pdf can really slow your searches. Thats why I removed all my pdfs from my stacks or convert them into images.

hi. i think you misunderstood my post. searches are very fast, but the process evernote imposes is not, especially for users with lots of notes.

if, for example, you copy/paste a search query into the search field in evernote it returns results almost immediately. the problem i was pointing out (the same one google has) is that because evernote has an "instant search", starting at or around the third letter, it performs multiple searches that are totally unnecessary as you are typing in the search query. a search for a word like insane, therefore, has at least two searches: one for "ins" (of which there are going to be thousands and thousands of hits) and one for insane (of which there may only be one). both searches are fast (regardless of whether you have pdfs or just text), but the problem is that you have to perform two searches along the way.

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if, for example, you copy/paste a search query into the search field in evernote it returns results almost immediately. the problem i was pointing out (the same one google has) is that because evernote has an "instant search", starting at or around the third letter, it performs multiple searches that are totally unnecessary as you are typing in the search query. a search for a word like insane, therefore, has at least two searches: one for "ins" (of which there are going to be thousands and thousands of hits) and one for insane (of which there may only be one). both searches are fast (regardless of whether you have pdfs or just text), but the problem is that you have to perform two searches along the way.

Yeah I hope they will release a feature to toggle the instant search because the only way Im coping with the staggering search speed , is to type my search first into textedit and when copy paste it into the evernote search. :S

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if, for example, you copy/paste a search query into the search field in evernote it returns results almost immediately. the problem i was pointing out (the same one google has) is that because evernote has an "instant search", starting at or around the third letter, it performs multiple searches that are totally unnecessary as you are typing in the search query. a search for a word like insane, therefore, has at least two searches: one for "ins" (of which there are going to be thousands and thousands of hits) and one for insane (of which there may only be one). both searches are fast (regardless of whether you have pdfs or just text), but the problem is that you have to perform two searches along the way.

Yeah I hope they will release a feature to toggle the instant search because the only way Im coping with the staggering search speed , is to type my search first into textedit and when copy paste it into the evernote search. :S

indeed. i am hoping it will get put on the roadmap :)

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I'm not sure that Evernote is the best place to store a large number of large PDF books, i.e., a library.

I can see storing abstracts, notes, etc about the books, along with a link to the book in places like Dropbox.

It does not make sense to me to include all of these books in my Evernote searches.

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I'm not sure that Evernote is the best place to store a large number of large PDF books, i.e., a library.

I can see storing abstracts, notes, etc about the books, along with a link to the book in places like Dropbox.

It does not make sense to me to include all of these books in my Evernote searches.

i disagree.

with a single search i can not only find everything in my own notes about a research topic, but everything that has ever been written. this is an incredibly powerful feature that evernote basically makes available in the palm of my hand wherever i am. to give a more concrete example: i am in the process of uploading every note and handout from every class that i have ever taken or taught so that i can refer to anything i want from my entire academic career. amazing. this is the kind of stuff i used to read about in science fiction, and now i am living the dream :)

i don't think my case is unique. a health care professional looking for information on drug x can browse through the pdfs of medical journals and books they have stored in evernote to instantly find what they need to see. anyone interested in politics can browse through the legislation and related documents of anything related to an issue they want to promote. a person in business looking for that fact or figure can instantly browse through bookshelves worth of executive summaries, reports, and analyses. wow. the possibilities are endless!

dropbox? it has its uses, but i'm afraid it is quite limited in comparison. evernote is what makes these pdfs sing. of course, the cool thing about evernote is that you can always exclude the material from your searches using the advanced search grammar. in other words, you have nothing to lose by putting a pdf into evernote and a whole lot to gain.

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Regardless of what is being searched, the question was about speed. I've not had any problems with speed but I have a tiny fraction of what you do stored as PDFs.

I wonder, however, once Evernote has searched a PDF and return-synched it to our side, what is the search speed then? I'm sure they have a really fast text-based way to search the keywords sussed from the PDF's.

Furthermore, I wonder how much, if any, difference it makes to let the scanning software make a searchable PDF before letting Evernote at it. Does it get in EN's way? Does it help? Can anyone answer these? :)

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i disagree.

with a single search i can not only find everything in my own notes about a research topic, but everything that has ever been written. this is an incredibly powerful feature that evernote basically makes available in the palm of my hand wherever i am.

. . .

GM, I don't disagree that it would be very powerful to search the universe.

The problem is finding just the one or two, or even ten, notes that you want out of the tens of thousands of Notes, hundreds of thousands of PDF pages.

For example, I just did a Google search on "microsoft office 2011"

Google found "About 300,000,000 results"

Due to the magical, proprietary, Google search engine, the results of most interest to me are at the top of the list.

But Evernote is no Google. It's search engine does not even attempt to rank the results.

Also Google has a very large number (unknown to the public) of very high power servers to run the search engine on.

Evernote has only a tiny percent of this server power.

Frankly, I don't think there is practical use case to be always searching a large number of large books/documents on a full text basis. I can see doing a full text search after I have narrowed down my targets to a relatively small number of books (say around 10).

Finally, you are going to have physical storage problems.

  • The Evernote database on your local PC/Mac can be stored only in local hard drives -- not on a USB attached drive or attached server.
  • So you will quickly run out of storage space to hold your massive library.
  • I for one don't want to maintain a copy of this large library on every PC/Mac that I install Evernote on.
  • And then what about mobile devices like the iPad, with a max of 64 GB?

With a limit of 1 GB/month uploads, you will quickly saturate your limits with this large library.

Finally, if a substantial number of users choose to upload these large libraries, it will force Evernote to have a massive increase of server storage, which I'm not sure they are prepared to handle.

All I'm saying is that Evernote is a great tool for lots of things. But just like we don't want to push Evernote into a lot of features available on other dedicated apps (Word, Photoshop, Excel, etc), I think we don't want to push them towards a huge new feature of large library storage.

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i disagree.

with a single search i can not only find everything in my own notes about a research topic, but everything that has ever been written. this is an incredibly powerful feature that evernote basically makes available in the palm of my hand wherever i am.

. . .

GM, I don't disagree that it would be very powerful to search the universe.

The problem is finding just the one or two, or even ten, notes that you want out of the tens of thousands of Notes, hundreds of thousands of PDF pages.

I don't need to search the universe. Just my stuff. It hasn't been a problem for me, and I have hundreds of PDF attachments and thousands of notes. Thankfully, Evernote gives you lots of advanced search grammar to focus searches if necessary.

Finally, you are going to have physical storage problems.

The Evernote database on your local PC/Mac can be stored only in local hard drives -- not on a USB attached drive or attached server.

Yes. I have frequently requested the ability we have on mobile platforms to toggle notebooks offline/online. Alas, my pleas have not yet fallen on sympathetic ears. One sad consequence of this is that I cannot purchase a Macbook Air, because its storage capacity is insufficient for the task.

So you will quickly run out of storage space to hold your massive library.

I have terabytes of data, so I do have to be selective. At best, though, you can only add 24GB of data to Evernote each year, so it will be a few years before I fill up my hard drive. Hopefully, I can convince Evernote to change its offline/online notebook policy by then or (better yet) just move myself entirely to the iPad.

And then what about mobile devices like the iPad, with a max of 64 GB?

Online notebooks.

Finally, if a substantial number of users choose to upload these large libraries, it will force Evernote to have a massive increase of server storage, which I'm not sure they are prepared to handle.

I cannot comment on that, but I doubt too many users are digital hoarders like I am.

All I'm saying is that Evernote is a great tool for lots of things. But just like we don't want to push Evernote into a lot of features available on other dedicated apps (Word, Photoshop, Excel, etc), I think we don't want to push them towards a huge new feature of large library storage.

I'm not pushing. They are offering it (1 GB a month) and I am taking them up on their offer :)

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Yes. I have frequently requested the ability we have on mobile platforms to toggle notebooks offline/online. Alas, my pleas have not yet fallen on sympathetic ears. One sad consequence of this is that I cannot purchase a Macbook Air, because its storage capacity is insufficient for the task.

It is unlikely that the direct storage of any laptop will ever be enough to store a large library. The current MBA can have up to 256 GB, and the MacBook Pro can have up to 750 GB. As the SSD capacity goes up and the price down we will see larger units in the MBA. Even so, it will never be enough.

My read on storage technology is that we are moving more and more to having most of our data stored in the cloud, with our immediate needs downloaded by streaming. So you could have your entire huge massive (did I say very large? ;) ) library somewhere in the cloud. Then when you need to search or read a book/document, you do it via the cloud, downloading only what you need, a few pages at a time. So, local storage requirements become relatively small.

Of course this requires a real-time continuous connection to the Internet. But I think we are getting there with the emerging LTE wireless technology, and then in (hopefully) just a few years, we will get to true 4G wireless (1Gbps).

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The cloud is the future! But, I am never going to be completely sold on it, because my data is too precious to entrust to someone else. I really like Evernote's philosophy of giving us control over our data. What I don't like is that there is only one way to do it: sync it all to your hard drive or sync nothing at all. A toggle (just like on our mobile devices) would solve the problem. I could save notebook A with a few hundred PDFs to my external HD, toggle it to "online", and not have to worry a bit about storage space. *sigh* Someday :) Or, I will just end up on my iPad, and it won't matter anymore.

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The cloud is the future! But, I am never going to be completely sold on it, because my data is too precious to entrust to someone else.

Do you also keep your cash stored in your mattress? :D

GM, you're way to young to have such an "old school" mentality! ;)

You're already half way there if you are scanning your documents and keeping only the electronic version.

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with a single search i can not only find everything in my own notes about a research topic, but everything that has ever been written. this is an incredibly powerful feature that evernote basically makes available in the palm of my hand wherever i am. to give a more concrete example: i am in the process of uploading every note and handout from every class that i have ever taken or taught so that i can refer to anything i want from my entire academic career. amazing. this is the kind of stuff i used to read about in science fiction, and now i am living the dream :)

i don't think my case is unique. a health care professional looking for information on drug x can browse through the pdfs of medical journals and books they have stored in evernote to instantly find what they need to see.

Yeah, I'm also a health care professional. and this is also the way how I use evernote!:) I should have discovered evernote 5 years ago! :c

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Yeah, I'm also a health care professional. and this is also the way how I use evernote! :) I should have discovered evernote 5 years ago! :c

evernote99, may I ask a few questions about your Evernote iPad experience?

  1. about how many PDFs you have in Evernote?
  2. what is the average size?
  3. How do you store the Notes with PDFs on your iPad:

    1. All Notes/PDFs in offline Notebooks
    2. Selected Notes/PDFs in offline Notebooks
    3. None in offline notebooks -- read online as needed



      Thanks.
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Yeah, I'm also a health care professional. and this is also the way how I use evernote! :) I should have discovered evernote 5 years ago! :c

evernote99, may I ask a few questions about your Evernote iPad experience?

  1. about how many PDFs you have in Evernote?
  2. what is the average size?
  3. How do you store the Notes with PDFs on your iPad:

    1. All Notes/PDFs in offline Notebooks
    2. Selected Notes/PDFs in offline Notebooks
    3. None in offline notebooks -- read online as needed



      Thanks.

      Im not anymore using pdf for my books and references. I convert most of my medical stuff to image files.
      I mean PDFs for the desktop version is somewhat better because you can view
instantly the page containing the searched item and I can switch immediately to another pdf if I dont find what im looking for. Unlike in the ipad, i need to click first on the "pdf icon" to show it.
I tried experimenting searching on one pdf(200pages) versus images(same pdf file save as image in adobe acrobat= 200 jpgs) (both pdf and images OCRd by evernote) to find out which is faster. and i noticed it is faster on images. Perhaps evernote processes more resources with a pdf than a simple image file.
for example, i search for the term "diabetes". With pdf, I need to use command+g to go to the next word. but with images, evernote will bring me all the pages which contain the term diabetes.
to answer your question:
i used to have 25-30 pdfs in evernote (plus 12,000+ more notes)
averaging 15-70mb in size
all are offline.
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Oh, regarding my textedit work around, I discovered this amazing app!

download the keyboard maestro

1) then bind f9(or any keyboard shortcut) to TextEdit

2) then bind f10(or any keyboard shortcut) to these

h5CBO.jpg

and voila! searching made faster ala ipad!

So here is my workflow, F9 to bring textedit then type my search then press f10 and presto!

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Thank to this topic, that's what I am searching for, I am trying to find out the impact of large pdf might be on the performance of searching in evernote, currently I am doing complete digitizing for all my books(I don't have too many print books, about 50 books , most of them are textbook from my master degree and doctor degree study). So I cutted books' spine, scanned some of them, realized the pdf size is big problem, without compressing further, 1000 pages occupes 340mb! I can't tolerate the lower quality of scanned images, so I think I won't be able to compress a lot for these pdfs:(

I plan to make then smaller than 50MB per files due to Evernote's limitation, and put them in separate notebook.

I think the non-searchable information equals garbage, I love Evernote!

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so far, splitting things into notebooks has not made the anything noticeably faster. i have about 500 pdf books in evernote, and i put them into their own notebook. in another test account, i have just one article, and only 35 notes. it is faster (on the ipad), but still not winning any speed contests. my guess is that the number of notes might have a larger impact on speed.

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is anyone else finding notebooks to speed up performance, searches or otherwise? if not, i think i will get rid of these notebooks and go back to having just one. it isn't worth the trouble...

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I actually have found notebooks to speed up my workflow in Evernote a bit, in terms of search queries, use of offline notebooks, and general ease of access, but that's not to say I couldn't accomplish the same effect with tags.

I used to only have a few notebooks, but when trying to reorganize all my data a while back, I made a bunch of temporary notebooks at the time to make it easy to sort and group things as I was going. While I was doing that, the stacks feature was released, and I started grouping them into stacks as well. Pretty soon, I had hundreds of notebooks and dozens of stacks, and I've never looked back. Tags are used on rare occasion, but it is very rare.

Part of the reason I took a liking to notebooks more was that my most frequent use for getting content into Evernote, which is still true today, is web clipping. Many times those notes get edited and added to on the various Evernote clients, but they still tend to start on the web and funnel in through the web clipper. With the way the web clipper works, throughout many of it's iterations, notebooks were selectable from a drop down menu, whereas tags had to be typed in. They get filled in automatically as you type, but they still need text to work. At the time I was going through all of this, I was working standing up a fair distance from my keyboard, often times on a huge HDTV repurposed as a monitor, using an air mouse to control the curser. As I didn't have keyboard access, tags weren't as easy to clip with, but notebooks still had the dropdown menu, so they functioned quite well. The same holds true for selecting notebooks on the Windows client within the note options itself, generating a giant list of notebooks from which to pick, whereas I don't think tags operate that way.

More to the point of your question though, with the shear volume and variety of the notes that I have, notebooks have spead up my ability to search and use Evernote, searching specifically from within the view of a notebook on the Windows client. I also like that a note can only have ONE notebook, while it can have many tags, as it's pretty easy for my notes to get lost in the mix for me if they're in too many places. Notebooks vs tags also gives me the ability to delete a notebook, and with it all of it's contained notes, but you can also accomplish that function in the desktop clients by clicking or searching for the tagged notes and doing a batch delete. That's not as easy on the iOS front, however, which is where I spend most of my time now, despite all the countless problems I've run into with the Evernote iOS clients making it almost unusable at times. Tags also don't have hierarchy on the iOS front any longer, where as notebook stacks have remained on the iPhone version.

Some of my notebooks are very, VERY large in size too, which I don't want downloaded on my mobile devices if I can avoid it, so that also factors in. That, and the fact that due to all the technical issues I've had with the iOS clients, I usually can't access a note unless it's been downloaded to an offline notebook. Any offline notebook downloading takes ages regardless of connection as well, both of which keep me using notebooks as opposed to tags.

On the iPhone, the Offline Notebook page also gives me a quick little customizable notebook view of my many notebooks right at the top of the list.

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is anyone else finding notebooks to speed up performance, searches or otherwise? if not, i think i will get rid of these notebooks and go back to having just one. it isn't worth the trouble...

I have not experienced any noticeable performance benefit from having multiple notebooks.

My take is that any time saved from having multiple notebooks is probably lost in maintaining a notebook/tag structure.

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I actually have found notebooks to speed up my workflow in Evernote a bit, in terms of search queries, use of offline notebooks, and general ease of access, but that's not to say I couldn't accomplish the same effect with tags.

I used to only have a few notebooks, but when trying to reorganize all my data a while back, I made a bunch of temporary notebooks at the time to make it easy to sort and group things as I was going. While I was doing that, the stacks feature was released, and I started grouping them into stacks as well. Pretty soon, I had hundreds of notebooks and dozens of stacks, and I've never looked back. Tags are used on rare occasion, but it is very rare.

Part of the reason I took a liking to notebooks more was that my most frequent use for getting content into Evernote, which is still true today, is web clipping. Many times those notes get edited and added to on the various Evernote clients, but they still tend to start on the web and funnel in through the web clipper. With the way the web clipper works, throughout many of it's iterations, notebooks were selectable from a drop down menu, whereas tags had to be typed in. They get filled in automatically as you type, but they still need text to work. At the time I was going through all of this, I was working standing up a fair distance from my keyboard, often times on a huge HDTV repurposed as a monitor, using an air mouse to control the curser. As I didn't have keyboard access, tags weren't as easy to clip with, but notebooks still had the dropdown menu, so they functioned quite well. The same holds true for selecting notebooks on the Windows client within the note options itself, generating a giant list of notebooks from which to pick, whereas I don't think tags operate that way.

More to the point of your question though, with the shear volume and variety of the notes that I have, notebooks have spead up my ability to search and use Evernote, searching specifically from within the view of a notebook on the Windows client. I also like that a note can only have ONE notebook, while it can have many tags, as it's pretty easy for my notes to get lost in the mix for me if they're in too many places. Notebooks vs tags also gives me the ability to delete a notebook, and with it all of it's contained notes, but you can also accomplish that function in the desktop clients by clicking or searching for the tagged notes and doing a batch delete. That's not as easy on the iOS front, however, which is where I spend most of my time now, despite all the countless problems I've run into with the Evernote iOS clients making it almost unusable at times. Tags also don't have hierarchy on the iOS front any longer, where as notebook stacks have remained on the iPhone version.

Some of my notebooks are very, VERY large in size too, which I don't want downloaded on my mobile devices if I can avoid it, so that also factors in. That, and the fact that due to all the technical issues I've had with the iOS clients, I usually can't access a note unless it's been downloaded to an offline notebook. Any offline notebook downloading takes ages regardless of connection as well, both of which keep me using notebooks as opposed to tags.

On the iPhone, the Offline Notebook page also gives me a quick little customizable notebook view of my many notebooks right at the top of the list.

thanks for the comments! personally, i find it pretty easy to navigate through my notes through a combination of titling, saved searches, and advanced search grammar. evernote's search filtering, of coruse, is what makes browsing possible.

i was thinking more along the lines of overall application speed. i notice no appreciable difference myself. your points about the speed of using the account, though, are well-taken.

the ios app is pretty rough for navigation, no matter how you organize your account. at best, you can only see a handful of notes (four in the regular view) at once, even though i have a retina screen. i am really hoping we'll get a list view and that they'll make it a lot more productivity-oriented this year.

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If I imported, say, 50K items (just text, typically about 300 characters per item) from Supermemo into Evernote, would I encounter speed issues during searches from the Windows Desktop client, Webpage, or iPhone app?

If you did, it wouldn't be because of the notes so much as the slowness of the clients at times. Despite all I've thrown into Evernote, which totals 70k notes that are at times multiple iterations of full PDF books within a single note, search isn't that bad. Segmenting things with tags (that are and aren't on notes), searching titles only, limiting things within a notebook, constraining date ranges and combining all that within a single search helps alot with that, but even just typing something in at random doesn't really effect the 'speed' of the search all that much as it scales. Atleast for me.

If you imported a portion of your notes into Evernote on a free account and ran searches that way as a test, that's likely what the speed would be for search if you imported much more. If you're fine with that experience on any of them, then that's pretty much what it'd be. I don't have issues with search so much as the general experience of all the clients as they scale, stability that can get shaky when your account gets large on the mobile devices, and the way they present information on the mobile clients. If you had that many notes and ran a search, on the iOS apps for example, it'll display them as cards, which tend to amount to a relatively limited number of items on screen at a time. Every time I open the web app it also crashes or just fails to load, but if there's a client on all devices, I don't really need the web app, so I'm ok with that. I'd like the web app if it worked for me, and I really enjoy the Windows app when it works, however.

If your notes are all text notes of that nature, however, Evernote probably isn't the best program for you. Particularly not if you're asking about speed during search. You'd get alot more agility and functionality in apps that are plain text based like SimpleNote, or anything that syncs with that or Dropbox Plaintext files, like Nebulous Notes, Notesy, WriteUp, Elements, nvALT on the Mac, Resoph Notes on Windows, Notebooks by Alfons Schmid on any platform, etc. Evernote's still great for mixed rich content that can come from a variety of sources, OCR in images, having all your data backed up and secure in the cloud, and as time goes on, sharing all that online with others. But if I had all my info in plaintext as you do, I would stick to a program that's designed with plaintext in mind, saving Evernote for the things it does best.

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  • 6 months later...

with a single search i can not only find everything in my own notes about a research topic, but everything that has ever been written. this is an incredibly powerful feature that evernote basically makes available in the palm of my hand wherever i am. to give a more concrete example: i am in the process of uploading every note and handout from every class that i have ever taken or taught so that i can refer to anything i want from my entire academic career. amazing. this is the kind of stuff i used to read about in science fiction, and now i am living the dream :)i don't think my case is unique. a health care professional looking for information on drug x can browse through the pdfs of medical journals and books they have stored in evernote to instantly find what they need to see.

Yeah, I'm also a health care professional. and this is also the way how I use evernote!:) I should have discovered evernote 5 years ago! :c

I am in healthcare also. There is much I can't upload to EN or Dropbox related to work because of my HCS System's privacy policies.

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If I imported, say, 50K items (just text, typically about 300 characters per item) from Supermemo into Evernote, would I encounter speed issues during searches from the Windows Desktop client, Webpage, or iPhone app?

If you did, it wouldn't be because of the notes so much as the slowness of the clients at times. Despite all I've thrown into Evernote, which totals 70k notes that are at times multiple iterations of full PDF books within a single note, search isn't that bad. Segmenting things with tags (that are and aren't on notes), searching titles only, limiting things within a notebook, constraining date ranges and combining all that within a single search helps alot with that, but even just typing something in at random doesn't really effect the 'speed' of the search all that much as it scales. Atleast for me.

If you imported a portion of your notes into Evernote on a free account and ran searches that way as a test, that's likely what the speed would be for search if you imported much more. If you're fine with that experience on any of them, then that's pretty much what it'd be. I don't have issues with search so much as the general experience of all the clients as they scale, stability that can get shaky when your account gets large on the mobile devices, and the way they present information on the mobile clients. If you had that many notes and ran a search, on the iOS apps for example, it'll display them as cards, which tend to amount to a relatively limited number of items on screen at a time. Every time I open the web app it also crashes or just fails to load, but if there's a client on all devices, I don't really need the web app, so I'm ok with that. I'd like the web app if it worked for me, and I really enjoy the Windows app when it works, however.

If your notes are all text notes of that nature, however, Evernote probably isn't the best program for you. Particularly not if you're asking about speed during search. You'd get alot more agility and functionality in apps that are plain text based like SimpleNote, or anything that syncs with that or Dropbox Plaintext files, like Nebulous Notes, Notesy, WriteUp, Elements, nvALT on the Mac, Resoph Notes on Windows, Notebooks by Alfons Schmid on any platform, etc. Evernote's still great for mixed rich content that can come from a variety of sources, OCR in images, having all your data backed up and secure in the cloud, and as time goes on, sharing all that online with others. But if I had all my info in plaintext as you do, I would stick to a program that's designed with plaintext in mind, saving Evernote for the things it does best.

 

I know I am several months late with this response, but I work primarily in plain text, and I would still recommend Evernote, because it syncs across devices. Frankly speaking, none of the plain text apps on iOS handle thousands of notes very well. Personally, notesy is one of my favorites, but I get lots of sync conflicts, and searching through content+title is pretty much impossible for me (agonizingly long, and it doesn't help that it does incremental searches). If you are only working on Macs (for example), I think a case could be made for nvalt, but even then, Evernote offers a lot of nice tools. 

 

 

 

with a single search i can not only find everything in my own notes about a research topic, but everything that has ever been written. this is an incredibly powerful feature that evernote basically makes available in the palm of my hand wherever i am. to give a more concrete example: i am in the process of uploading every note and handout from every class that i have ever taken or taught so that i can refer to anything i want from my entire academic career. amazing. this is the kind of stuff i used to read about in science fiction, and now i am living the dream :)i don't think my case is unique. a health care professional looking for information on drug x can browse through the pdfs of medical journals and books they have stored in evernote to instantly find what they need to see.

Yeah, I'm also a health care professional. and this is also the way how I use evernote! :) I should have discovered evernote 5 years ago! :c

I am in healthcare also. There is much I can't upload to EN or Dropbox related to work because of my HCS System's privacy policies.

 

Evernote is definitely not appropriate for medical records and the like, because it is expressly not HIPAA compliant, and they have said they have no plans to do everything that would be necessary to meet those requirements.

 

Evernote would be nice, though, for PDFs of medical journals, medical texts, and so forth that have no patient information. In addition, your own notes on your studies / experience could be stored in Evernote (omitting personal info, of course). 

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I agree with Grumpy.

 

Text:

Over half of my notes are web captures of political sites using Clearly - almost all text. Search is fast and accurate. Tags and notebooks help streamline the entire process. Evernote search grammar is the frosting on the cake.

 

Medical:

From the other side of the fence as a health receiver who does not have to worry about HIPAA, Evernote is great for storing all my medical stuff. Just returned from the eye doctor this afternoon. Scanned in my new eyeglass prescription (1) along with a couple photos the Doctor emailed me of the inside back portion of my eyes (2).

 

Reminders:

I also scanned the receipt (3) and created a reminder note to pick up the new glasses next week (4).

 

I have 22,000 notes (almost all PDF scans) in Evernote. The speed is top notch.

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