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(Archived) HOWTO: 2 accounts or other solutions


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I am considering splitting up my Evernote world into two separate accounts - one for work and one for home. My main reason is that I'm becoming increasingly uncomfortable having any of my personal notes and data on my work machine. Plus it is a distraction when searching for work-related stuff. I want a clear, bright line between my work life and my home life.

I've solved this problem for years now by primarily using local notebooks on my home machine, so those notes never go to the cloud and never get to my work machine. The problem here is of course that I miss out on some of the benefits of cloud storage. Add in to this that I've been using my iPhone more and more and keep finding incidents where I wish I had some of those personal notebooks on my phone...but of course I can't. And then this thread about local notebooks being perhaps a mistake makes me nervous: https://support.evernote.com/link/portal/16051/16058/Article/2560/How-can-I-merge-the-contents-of-two-Evernote-accounts-into-a-single-account

I've already broken my clean work/home line with a few synced notebooks. I use stacks to make it a bit easier to search my work notes without distraction, but sometimes it is just faster to hit "all notes"...and then of course the personal stuff shows up. I also have to shuffle notes around quite a bit - if I create notes on my phone, for instance, I move them into the correct personal local notebooks later to remove them from the cloud. It would be nice to be able to just put them in the right spot from the get go. Sometimes they linger in my inbox for several day, getting in my way at work, before I have the chance to move them (my own laziness obviously, but still).

I wish we had the ability for a selective sync on desktops, as that would completely solve this issue. But since we don't, I'm thinking about doing the work/home account split. I assume that if I ever DID have a notebook I wanted to use in both places (unlikely) I could use shared notebooks. (I've never used shared notebooks so I don't know the pitfalls of this).

So - has anyone managed two accounts like this? What are the pitfalls? And furthermore, how do I get my current stuff in my one account shifted over into a new account without losing anything? I have used EN for a long time (since it was just a Windows app with no online service component) so I have LOTS of notes. Some specs on my account:

  • On my work machine, I have over 8000 notes that would need to move to the new work-only account (in 3 different notebooks - two synced and one local)
  • I have almost 1000 other notes on this machine that are in the cloud. I would want these to stay in the personal account and no longer appear on this machine.
  • My work machine is Windows 7. My home machine is a Mac. Current release versions of EN on both (no betas)
  • I also use the iPhone app. I would continue to keep the iPhone linked to my personal account. I've never (so far) needed to access a work note on my phone.
  • I'm a premium user; I want to continue to use the premium account for the home account so that I can have offline notebooks on the phone. So I'm thinking the new work account will initially be a free account. I'm not crazy about paying for two premiums (unless EN offers a multi-account discount??) so for now I'll have to live with the lack of premium features on the work account. I think I can live with that.
  • Once I manage the switch, I want to remove all traces of the personal account from the work machine.

In determining how to do do this, I found this article that explains how to do the opposite (export/import to merge two accounts): https://support.ever...single-account. I am guessing that the procedure is similar for the reverse (export from my current account, import into a new account). However, the article notes that created and modified dates are not preserved during this procedure. That may be a deal breaker for me. I can't have 8000+notes with the same created date! That would completely ruin all the history stored in my EN account.

Any ideas? Suggestions? Has anyone done this successfully?

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Hmm. I may check out Nixnote. I'm pretty used to the standard Windows client so I'll have to see how it compares before I go 100% with that solution though (in general, I'd prefer to stick with the official clients that Evernote has released).

My concern about created dates may be unfounded. I did a small test exporting a few notes and then reimporting. The created dates were all preserved just fine, while the modified dates became the date of the import. That makes sense. So I think the KB article I linked may be out of date (see https://support.evernote.com/link/portal/16051/16058/Article/2560/How-can-I-merge-the-contents-of-two-Evernote-accounts-into-a-single-account - my link in the earlier post has a stray period that causes it to not work). Unless of course it behaves differently when exporting from one account and importing into another...so I'd have to do a small test if I still go that route.

I'll check out nixnote when I get a chance though. I'd still like to hear from anyone who has done the same sort of 2-account setup though.

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Alternatively, with Nixnote you can setup a selective sync so you just synchronize your work stuff at work and your home stuff at home and keep everything in the same account. It has been a while, but I think that still works.

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I keep a separate account that I have used for testing in the past. There are few notes in it, and I really don't use it very often. It wasn't hard to set up under Windows, it's just that they can't be active in Evernote at the same time. The databases are wholly separate .exb files, though they live in the same directory. The second account is a free account. I suppose I could share notebooks across if I wanted to, but haven't tried that out yet.

As far as I can tell, created and updated dates are preserved when you export to .ENEX, but they get overwritten with the current date when you import into Evernote (not sure I agree with that behavior). I'm not sure how to get around that one.

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I am considering splitting up my Evernote world into two separate accounts - one for work and one for home. My main reason is that I'm becoming increasingly uncomfortable having any of my personal notes and data on my work machine. Plus it is a distraction when searching for work-related stuff. I want a clear, bright line between my work life and my home life.

I've solved this problem for years now by primarily using local notebooks on my home machine, so those notes never go to the cloud and never get to my work machine. The problem here is of course that I miss out on some of the benefits of cloud storage. Add in to this that I've been using my iPhone more and more and keep finding incidents where I wish I had some of those personal notebooks on my phone...but of course I can't. And then this thread about local notebooks being perhaps a mistake makes me nervous: https://support.evernote.com/link/portal/16051/16058/Article/2560/How-can-I-merge-the-contents-of-two-Evernote-accounts-into-a-single-account

I've already broken my clean work/home line with a few synced notebooks. I use stacks to make it a bit easier to search my work notes without distraction, but sometimes it is just faster to hit "all notes"...and then of course the personal stuff shows up. I also have to shuffle notes around quite a bit - if I create notes on my phone, for instance, I move them into the correct personal local notebooks later to remove them from the cloud. It would be nice to be able to just put them in the right spot from the get go. Sometimes they linger in my inbox for several day, getting in my way at work, before I have the chance to move them (my own laziness obviously, but still).

I wish we had the ability for a selective sync on desktops, as that would completely solve this issue. But since we don't, I'm thinking about doing the work/home account split. I assume that if I ever DID have a notebook I wanted to use in both places (unlikely) I could use shared notebooks. (I've never used shared notebooks so I don't know the pitfalls of this).

So - has anyone managed two accounts like this? What are the pitfalls? And furthermore, how do I get my current stuff in my one account shifted over into a new account without losing anything? I have used EN for a long time (since it was just a Windows app with no online service component) so I have LOTS of notes. Some specs on my account:

  • On my work machine, I have over 8000 notes that would need to move to the new work-only account (in 3 different notebooks - two synced and one local)
  • I have almost 1000 other notes on this machine that are in the cloud. I would want these to stay in the personal account and no longer appear on this machine.
  • My work machine is Windows 7. My home machine is a Mac. Current release versions of EN on both (no betas)
  • I also use the iPhone app. I would continue to keep the iPhone linked to my personal account. I've never (so far) needed to access a work note on my phone.
  • I'm a premium user; I want to continue to use the premium account for the home account so that I can have offline notebooks on the phone. So I'm thinking the new work account will initially be a free account. I'm not crazy about paying for two premiums (unless EN offers a multi-account discount??) so for now I'll have to live with the lack of premium features on the work account. I think I can live with that.
  • Once I manage the switch, I want to remove all traces of the personal account from the work machine.

In determining how to do do this, I found this article that explains how to do the opposite (export/import to merge two accounts): https://support.ever...single-account. I am guessing that the procedure is similar for the reverse (export from my current account, import into a new account). However, the article notes that created and modified dates are not preserved during this procedure. That may be a deal breaker for me. I can't have 8000+notes with the same created date! That would completely ruin all the history stored in my EN account.

Any ideas? Suggestions? Has anyone done this successfully?

If only we had the iPad/iPhone's "offline" notebook capability on our desktops!

Or, the ability to encrypt notebooks!

Forum regulars will recognize these as ongoing discussions. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to convince Evernote that this is needed yet. I went through a similar thought process, and I ended up putting everything in one account and sticking with an old laptop with a larger drive rather than upgrading to a Macbook Air (small SSD). I just cannot see two accounts working very well for me. I'd be pretty leery of that solution.

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Hmm, I suppose I should post a quick update. As it turns out, the dates ARE preserved when importing the data. I did a couple very small tests, exporting just a few notes and then importing back in. I tested importing back into the same account in Windows client, then in the same account in the Mac client, and then in a new account in the Windows client. In all cases, the dates came through correctly.

So the KB article must be out of date.

This past weekend I did the big export of all my work notes, then setup a new account just for work, and then imported them all in. This was all using the Windows client on my work machine. They came in fine. The only thing I lost was tag hierarchy. I had a lot of tags organized into the tree-like structure. In most of these cases, the higher levels were not assigned to any notes - they just provided structure for the child tags. So those tags were lost and I now have a flat list that I am reconstructing. I've been meaning to redo my tags for a while so this isn't a huge loss, but if you have a carefully designed set of tags, it is something to be leery of.

Finally, I did setup two notebooks in my original personal account to share with the work account, so I can still transfer notes back and forth if necessary. I have to do the sharing from the personal side since that is (currently) the only premium account out of the two. I am hoping to get by with a free account for work from here on out. This is my first use of the sharing features and so far they are working OK for me.

So far the solution is working for me. I like having a clean line between home and work now, and feeling that I can put more of my personal stuff into the cloud without bumping into it at at work. I've started moving many of my home notes into synchronized folders so that I can take full advantage of Evernote's features and have my notes on my iPhone. It is also rather nice to NOT be bombarded with all sorts of work notes when I search for things at home...I can just search from "All Notes" rather than a specific stack since the work stuff won't be cluttering things up in the home account anymore.

For now I think this will work, just because it is pretty clear to me exactly what goes in each account. So I don't expect to find myself mixed up on what got put in which account.

I still have the Evernote database files (exb files) from the original account on the work machine. Once I'm comfortable that I'm not going to undo all this, I plan to archive those files somewhere safe (at home) and hang on to them just as a backup. I'm also going to archive all the exported .enex files as a backup/snapshot of where things were this weekend.

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Hmm, I suppose I should post a quick update. As it turns out, the dates ARE preserved when importing the data. I did a couple very small tests, exporting just a few notes and then importing back in. I tested importing back into the same account in Windows client, then in the same account in the Mac client, and then in a new account in the Windows client. In all cases, the dates came through correctly.

My test was under Windows; exported to .ENEX, imported back into the other account. Created and updated dates changed both times.

The only thing I lost was tag hierarchy. I had a lot of tags organized into the tree-like structure. In most of these cases, the higher levels were not assigned to any notes - they just provided structure for the child tags. So those tags were lost and I now have a flat list that I am reconstructing. I've been meaning to redo my tags for a while so this isn't a huge loss, but if you have a carefully designed set of tags, it is something to be leery of.

Known issue, I believe. When you export notes as.ENEX, the notes just contain a list of the tags that label them, and no hierarchy information. When you export multiple notes, it appears that you just get a sequence of notes, with no notebook information, so there's nowhere to put any tag hierarchy information (even if it applied, since tags are global to all notebooks).

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Hmm, I suppose I should post a quick update. As it turns out, the dates ARE preserved when importing the data. I did a couple very small tests, exporting just a few notes and then importing back in. I tested importing back into the same account in Windows client, then in the same account in the Mac client, and then in a new account in the Windows client. In all cases, the dates came through correctly.

My test was under Windows; exported to .ENEX, imported back into the other account. Created and updated dates changed both times.

Hmm, very odd. I did my final transfer in Windows (since my work machine is a Windows 7 laptop). As far as I can tell, all the dates are intact. Some of my notes go all the way back to 2005 and they definitely still show those older dates. Not sure why I got different results.

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Hmm, very odd. I did my final transfer in Windows (since my work machine is a Windows 7 laptop). As far as I can tell, all the dates are intact. Some of my notes go all the way back to 2005 and they definitely still show those older dates. Not sure why I got different results.

Ah, now I see the difference. If you actually do an Import operation, the dates remain unchanged. If you do something like drag an exported note into Evernote, the dates will change to the time of its being dropped in.

So Export, then Import seems OK, modulo the tag/notebook thingie.

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I have found an alternate solution by using shortcuts to non EN environments.

I have at home a huge project to store all my rememberings. The logic is an excel spreadsheet where timeline is horizontal. Each column represents a month of my life from birth to today (I'm more than 50...). Each row represents a category (Residence, occupation, vehicle, trends, main events, external events, etc). I insert text and graphics to illustrate the various components of my life. most of these have hyperlinks to pictures or other documents.

Initially, I stored everything (excel spreadsheet and attachments) in the same notebook "Remembering", but I anticipated that through the time, the database will expand considerably. When I sync my work laptop to Evernote, I cannot exclude that database. As I often do presentations on a projector where I need to find information, I don't want to face the situation where notes related to my privacy appear next to the professional ones in front of a group of professional attendees.

Hence I made the following workaround:

The pictures are stored on my account at Picasa web. The excel spreadsheet hyperlinks now lead to these. The day I'll have to replace my home computer, I'll just have to sync my evernote and Picasa accounts.

sschertz, you may consider using a non EN storage (e.g. dropbox) for your home stuff and create hyperlinks from EN.

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