(Archived) Any chance Evernote would increase premium monthly usage limit?

[May 268]

Since I started adding my personal videos to Evernote I would really like to have a bit more space. Even though I compress those videos quite a lot, e.g. from around 800mb I manage to compress it to 30mb and it's so convenient to store them in Evernote. I have most of my life now documented in Evernote.

I know you can buy 1gb more but I really would like to have at least 3gb per month and paying 15$ every month is kind of expensive. It's not like I occasionally need more space, I really need at least 3gb each month consistently. Of course the more the better because then I could save reasonably high quality videos (720p instead of 360p). I'm just wondering if there's any chance we will get more space in near future.

What do you think?

Do you guys ever run into space issues? (1gb used to be enough for me until I started adding videos)

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Since I started adding my personal videos to Evernote I would really like to have a bit more space. Even though I compress those videos quite a lot, e.g. from around 800mb I manage to compress it to 30mb and it's so convenient to store them in Evernote. I have most of my life now documented in Evernote.

I know you can buy 1gb more but I really would like to have at least 3gb per month and paying 15$ every month is kind of expensive. It's not like I occasionally need more space, I really need at least 3gb each month consistently. Of course the more the better because then I could save reasonably high quality videos (720p instead of 360p). I'm just wondering if there's any chance we will get more space in near future.

What do you think?

Do you guys ever run into space issues? (1gb used to be enough for me until I started adding videos)

Evernote has increased limits in the past, so it's possible. But of course giving more space (that could be used & retained by clients for many years to come) without increasing charges for that perk may not be the wisest financial decision. Especially if you're talking about tripling the current limit. I have very often paid the extra $$ when I've wanted/needed the extra space & consider it a nominal sum. If I don't want to spend the extra money, then I either wait until my limit refreshes or find another option.

[gazumped 11,664]

Doesn't look like this would be a sensible commercial decision for Evernote; allowing the storage higher def pictures and video opens the door to lots of users moving their collections to Evernote to take up petabytes of bandwidth and unsearchable stored space - which if nothing else will generally slow down access and searches. 

 

I don't think they want to get into the mass storage business anyway...

[May 268]

I don't think they want to get into the mass storage business anyway...

I consider video and photos to be very important things to store as memories. So why not? The main appeal of Evernote is that everything is there.

Also when google glass come out and people start sending videos to Evernote and start running into space limits, more space would be pretty usefull.

Yeah, you could store photos and videos elsewhere, that's what I used to do until I figured out a very cool workflow that alows me to store and organize them in Evernote conveniently. Now that I store videos and photos in Evernote (along with everything else) it made it easier to access them from any device and also made Evernote a hell of a lot more valuable to me overall.

[May 268]

Also Yahoo has redesigned its Flickr photo-sharing service, offering users up to 1TB of storage without a fee.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22608122

That's pretty impressive. I think as technology improves it's not unreasonable to expect more space so I'm just wondering if it's going to happen any time soon in Evernote. I know there's no real answer, I'm just throwing it out there.

If they do increase space limits that'd be pretty cool, if they don't I'll just have to pay more for it :/ (a good thing for Evernote though lol ... Or is it?)

[heather 604]

At current limits (100,000 notes, 100MB per note), Evernote Personal accounts can reach 9.2TB of space. The speed at which you add the content is immaterial (by buying additional quota space per month.)

 

Evernote Business accounts can reach 5 times that (500,000 note limit.)

[May 268]

Evernote Personal accounts can reach 9.2TB of space

Which would take only 766 years to reach at a rate of 1gb per month

Doubt I'll live that long but who knows...

Overall space limit is not the issue, the relevant issue is monthly limit and having to pay $5 per each 1gb.

[s2sailor 2,193]

 

I don't think they want to get into the mass storage business anyway...

I consider video and photos to be very important things to store as memories. So why not? The main appeal of Evernote is that everything is there.

Also when google glass come out and people start sending videos to Evernote and start running into space limits, more space would be pretty usefull.

Yeah, you could store photos and videos elsewhere, that's what I used to do until I figured out a very cool workflow that alows me to store and organize them in Evernote conveniently. Now that I store videos and photos in Evernote (along with everything else) it made it easier to access them from any device and also made Evernote a hell of a lot more valuable to me overall.

 

I agree, memories aren't just text based.  It makes sense to eventually allow, and encourage, the collection of photo and video memories.  Currently though there is the scalability issue that others have commented on.  I'm only at 10K notes and have performance problems.  Search is "less than optimum" for me.  I turned off SearchAsYouTypeDelay the moment I first heard about that register tweak.  That helps but search is still painful at times.  It is slower in the v5 beta and I suspect the related notes and the search drop down menu overhead adds to that.  I like those features but if it is affecting search speed It would be good if it was optional. 

 

I'm sure EN is aware of all this, working on it and we'll see improvements, but for now at least I put very few photos in the database and no videos.  That said, I'm still interested in your photo organization workflow if you are willing to share.  Thanks.

[gazumped 11,664]

I still think it would be a bad commercial decision for Evernote to make - I totally accept your point that memories are at least 50% visual and auditory,  but there are a lot of people out there who would just see another T of storage as a good place for items and software of varying dubiety and start piling in even more rubbish than we add already.  I'd prioritise fast(er) access to the stuff I've already got here over more storage space.

[s2sailor 2,193]

I'd prioritise fast(er) access to the stuff I've already got here over more storage space.

Yup, I completely agree there.

[eric99 980]

The real power of Evernote is the "single point of access" for *all*  memories, including photo's and videos.  Images take lots of disk space but hardly affect the search engine's performance...

 

 

 

[jefito 5,589]

I'd prioritise fast(er) access to the stuff I've already got here over more storage space.

They're working on that: http://blog.evernote.com/tech/2013/08/27/how-to-upgrade-50m-user-indexes/ 

[gazumped 11,664]

Thanks! Hadn't seen that yet...  Ol' Evernote's "not disclosing roadmaps and deliveries" policy hard at work there.  I definitely approve the intentions - now to try a few searches...

[jefito 5,589]

Just came out this morning, I think, at least that's when it hit my news reader.

[gazumped 11,664]

Who needs a news reader? I have - The Forums!!  (That sounded better in my head with the dramatic music and all..) 

[May 268]

I'd prioritise fast(er) access to the stuff I've already got here over more storage space.

Sure, but that's not an issue in my case. Increasing monthly limit shouldn't slow Evernote down. I already upload tonnes of photos and (just started) videos per month and have over 20,000 notes and there's no problem. I use Evernote 99% of the time on iPad though and the search works differently than on desktop. Heck, I don't even store most of the attachments (photos and videos) locally in offline Notebooks just to save local storage space on iPad.

If you have performance issues on a desktop that's a totally different problem in my view.

The real power of Evernote is the "single point of access" for *all* memories, including photo's and videos. Images take lots of disk space but hardly affect the search engine's performance...

I agree... Photos need to be indexed via Evernote servers but videos are just unindexed attachments.

If anything I'd imagine storing lots of long pdfs and ebooks should slow Evernote search a lot more. Small size but lots of text. I think they even limit up to which point pdf and epub files are indexed. With videos or some other file attachments there's no such problem because search doesn't need to crawl through them.

[gazumped 11,664]

OK - I don't know enough for certain to argue the point;  it'd be nice if an Evernote person felt like contributing about now..

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

WRT photos, I don't want EN "wasting" their time trying to index all the photos I've taken that are just that - photos.  Photos of the family on vacations or holidays.  I don't put them in EN.  I have them on my hard drives & backed up to my cloud backup (Amazon S3 servers).  I organize them with ACDSee Photo Manager, which uses a tagging system much like Evernote's. 

 

WRT videos, I will make a note about the video in Evernote.  And it will include a link to the file on my hard drive. 

 

Sure it would be great to have EN the single repository for everything & I wish my car could fly.  But there has to be a reality check here.  I know I have multiple drives that store multiple terabytes of information including audio, video & photos.  And sure, disk is pretty cheap these days.  But if EN as a company allowed all 60+ million current users (plus future users) three or more times capacity than what is already offered (and didn't charge any more for it), I'd say that's a really dumb financial decision.  Evernote is geared to helping you remember & organize things.  It's not a backup system.  And more importantly, as s2sailor pointed out, there are severe scaling issues with the current system.  GrumpyMonkey & I both have had first hand experience with that.  So I'm with s2sailor & Gaz in that I'd prefer EN devote their resources to resolving the scaling issues that exist with the current level of upload before increasing upload limits.  

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I'm with May on this one. Ideally, Evernote ought to be scaling up to meet the demands of video users. They even have video notes (in the Japanese version of the Android app), so I think they'd agree. Does that mean they want to bump up the monthly limits to 3 GB? Sounds good to me, except that I couldn't even fit half a year of that onto my computer now, so I'd have to uninstall the desktop version if I wanted to take advantage of the extra upload allowance. Give me selective sync and then I'll be onboard. 

 

In the end, though, I want Evernote to do what is cost-effective and will keep them in business. Somehow, tripling our monthly upload amount without raising subscription fees or coming up with some other kind of revenue to offset it doesn't sound sustainable to me. I don't have the numbers, of course, but on the face of it the problem would appear to be significant. After all, indexing 3 times the amount of stuff, even with their new upgrades, is probably something to consider.

 

By the way, Heather said 9.2, but by my calculations the maximum amount you can put into an account is 9,766 GB / 9.5 TB. And, as May said, he could upload 49 GB a month if he wanted to pay for it (Business), so technically speaking, Evernote has made accommodations for his lifelogging

[jbenson2 2,147]

One of Evernote's biggest claims to fame is their multi-platform capability. They are keenly aware of the importance of mobile devices.

 

If Evernote increases the monthly upload to 3 GB, it will further exasperate the current problems of using a mobile unit to access these growing monster databases. I'd prefer to have Evernote slow down and address the existing growing pains before jumping into new issues caused by tripling their monthly updates.

[eric99 980]

I think it is commercially a bad decision not to provide image and video storage. Other cloud services will take over Evernote's business like ACDSee Photo Manager, who uses already a tagging system.

The "single access point" requirement doesn't say anything about the underlying implementation: Evernote could handle mass storage notes differently than regular notes to keep it scalable, but at least the user has one virtual repository.  

Compare it with the Web where I use a single search engine for all my queries as well.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I think it is commercially a bad decision not to provide image and video storage. Other cloud services will take over Evernote's business like ACDSee Photo Manager, who uses already a tagging system.

The "single access point" requirement doesn't say anything about the underlying implementation: Evernote could handle mass storage notes differently than regular notes to keep it scalable, but at least the user has one virtual repository.  

Compare it with the Web where I use a single search engine for all my queries as well.

I'm pretty sure Evernote is not concerned about ACDSee Photo Manager taking over EN's business, since they really are not that much competition.  ACDSee deals only with tagging & categorizing files.  You cannot make screen caps or simple notes in ACDSee but you can in Evernote.  Please note that I've used ACDSee for many years (well before I ever used Evernote)  & still use it, often several times a week.  I definitely figure there are many people like me, who use both.  I just don't see them as direct competition.

[gazumped 11,664]

Lessee - I use a browser for this sort of stuff, email software (and a browser) for email, Mindjet for mind mapping, Office for - well, lots - a Scansnap for my scanning,  Photoshop for editing,  Picassa for storage, sharing and grandfatherly bragging rights,  various other bits of software I can't be bothered to list for everything else..  Oh and I use Evernote about a zillion times a day.  It sure would be easier if I only had to open Evernote to do all those things,  but 1) it would get far too confusing bulky and slow,  and 2) these other guys have been doing their special thing for a long time - in some cases longer than Evernote's been around.  I use 'em because they're the best in their field.  I probably wouldn't use Evernote for none-Evernote-related stuff even of it had other bells and whistles available,  because like a Swiss Army Knife,  while everything might be available,  you wouldn't want to cut paper with those scissors.

 

Now - I know it's a bit of a stretch from 'more storage space' to all of the above,  but as Burgers pointed out - none of those apps can do what Evernote does,  so they don't need to worry over much about competitors in their field.  It would be good to have more headroom for note sizes - there are a few books in my collection that got split into two or three files - but I'm sure there are good reasons why it ain't been done yet.  It's Evernote's party,  so they get to choose the music.  Meantime there have been some good arguments made - let's wait and see if the Devs take heed.

 

[cinthia 1]

I still think it would be a bad commercial decision for Evernote to make - I totally accept your point that memories are at least 50% visual and auditory,  but there are a lot of people out there who would just see another T of storage as a good place for items and software of varying dubiety and start piling in even more rubbish than we add already.  I'd prioritise fast(er) access to the stuff I've already got here over more storage space.

I agree. There are a multitude of services and options available for video storage, including personal cloud solutions.  Heck, you can even upload your videos to youtube and make them private if you really want to. Evernote's strength lies in document storage. It's the ONLY service of it's kind for a digital filing cabinet. It's a God send for creative writers where OCR is a salvation. I too have lots of videos but there are better places to store them. Mass storage of videos is a waste of precious Evernote capabilities. 

If it ain't broke.... So many times folks "improve" (aka worry about matching competitors), they lose the unique feature that set them apart. 

The mark of a great painter is knowing when to put down the brush.

[Sugeeth Krish 475]

When I started using Evernote initially, I too thought that the limit of 60 mb for free and 1 gb for premium was harsh. However, now I understand the reason and also how Evernote is different from big storage guys like dropbox or Gdrive.

dropbox , Gdrive and mega and that class of apps are essentially a virtual cloud based harddisk meant to store any file type and of any file size. They don't really have a focus file type. However, Evernote is primarily a text based app which can also handle other file types. If you look at the various functionality like web clipper , reminders , editing, etc, you know that this is a txt based platform which can also handle a limited amount of other file types. So, with this sort of a mindset, I don't think file quota will change drastically.

Most importantly, you can see the difference when other file systems look at storage while Evernote calculates upload bandwidth.

[Michel D Marques 2]

Since I started adding my personal videos to Evernote I would really like to have a bit more space. Even though I compress those videos quite a lot, e.g. from around 800mb I manage to compress it to 30mb and it's so convenient to store them in Evernote. I have most of my life now documented in Evernote.

I know you can buy 1gb more but I really would like to have at least 3gb per month and paying 15$ every month is kind of expensive. It's not like I occasionally need more space, I really need at least 3gb each month consistently. Of course the more the better because then I could save reasonably high quality videos (720p instead of 360p). I'm just wondering if there's any chance we will get more space in near future.

What do you think?

Do you guys ever run into space issues? (1gb used to be enough for me until I started adding videos)

 

What about a business account? 

 

"Reasons for an individual to upgrade to Evernote Business:

1) Increased upload quota. Evernote Business Premium users get two personal gigs, plus two gigs per person for the whole business in a 'family-plan' style sharing set up. So if you are a heavy user, you would get 4 gigs of space for $10 a month. 4 gigs a month on a regular premium account will cost you $20 per month."   (from here:http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/32373-its-not-clear-what-the-advantages-are-over-premium/page-2#entry175892 )