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(Archived) REQUEST: Scheduled export of specific notebooks


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Posted

I would love a feature that would allow automated and scheduled export of notebooks. This would be hugely valuable to any individuals or groups that need frequent local backups of Evernote. Additionally, being able to automatically export those notebooks separately would be useful, especially because people might have personal and work notebooks on the same account, or have notebooks for several projects that should be kept separate.

A little more detail:

I am a graduate student working in a biology lab. I and several of my colleagues are have recently adopted Evernote to manage our daily lab data, but we need to have frequent backups to our lab's servers. Currently we have everyone making manual exports (of .enex files) every week and then automate the rest of the process. The problem is that people forget. I have found a 3rd party solution (http://evernoteexporter.codeplex.com/releases/view/79142), but it exports all notebooks together.

This would be awesome if it existed in Evernote - it's the primary reason that my bosses have been hesitant to allow us to use Evernote. But if anyone knows of 3rd party apps or extensions that can do this same thing, I would appreciate a link!

Posted

Using export to backup Evernote is not the best method. The best method is to simply backup your database. In the Windows client, that's your exb file. IDK what it is on Mac. And of course, there are already a lot of ways to automate/schedule backups to other hard drives and/or a cloud. And, IMO, if you have work & personal items in the same database, it really doesn't make any sense to try to do two backups (IE your export example.) If they peacefully coexist in the same database, then back them up in the same database. If you ever need to export one section, for whatever reason, you can do so at that time.

Posted

Thanks for the response!

I'll look into the database itself, as you suggested, and so perhaps I'll find that the concern I mention next is nothing to be worried about:

Because our lab notebooks will need to be stored indefinitely, they need to be as future-proof and software-independent as possible. Since the .enex format is XML, it satisfies these requirements. An HTML output would also work for this reason. Our bosses need to be able to quickly get into our backed up notebooks, even 10 years from now, without having to deal with figuring out how to make a database work. If there is an easy way to search through the database that is fairly future-proof, I would appreciate your insight on that.

On the public/private issue, the main thing is that neither we nor our workplace would want the personal data to be backed up on work servers. It's true that we could separate them out after the fact, but that would still require that private data being stored in public space.

Posted

If you are on Windows, you can actually pass command line parameters in to Evernote, which you could then use to automate. Your forum post inspired me to write this blog post: http://www.documentsnap.com/automate-evernote-windows-command-line/.

You could probably do something like that combined with the built-in Windows task scheduler to accomplish what you are looking for.

If you are on Mac, you could probably do something similar with an AppleScript.

Posted

Thanks bduncan, that is hugely helpful. I must not have looked hard enough for command-line functions and arguments - I'll get right on this.

  • 1 year later...
Posted

The best method is to simply backup your database. In the Windows client, that's your exb file.

 

VERY important to ensure Evernote is not running when you back up the file.  Despite most backup program's claims of open-file-backup ability, files that are very large tend to not back up properly.  Make sure evernote.exe is not running.

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