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ja2038

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I have a directory of legal files. The directory is filled with subdirectories, each subdirectory's name follows a "YYYYMMDD - Description" and directory contains half a dozen files of correspondence to/from my attorney or motions or orders surrounding a legal issue in my divorce.

 

There are about 2 gigs of data, of which 500 Mb are text, pdf, and .doc, and the other 1.5 Mb are some large videos.

 

I would love to:

 

Import the whole thing into Evernote with one click

Get a list of which files Evernote doesn't import due to size or other restrictions

Have the directory structure recreated as a stack of notebooks

 

And the reason I want to do this is so I can

 

+ search pdfs

+ make various common tags across documents ("me", "her", "court order", "visitation", ...) stuff like that.

 

And if I can do that, I can probably throw away a large filing cabinets worth of paper!

 

Can this be done with Evernote Premium?

What is the best way to do this?

 

Thanks

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You cannot do it in one click, not with the free version, not with premium. You likely will not be able to do it in one fell swoop either; 2GB will most likely expand out to more than that, and you won't have enough upload capacity to take it all in, unless, possibly, if you're a premium user. You may want to look into "auto import folders" (https://evernote.com/contact/support/kb/#/article/23186693) for Evernote, but they're not going to help you to automatically set up stacks of separate notebooks; when you set up an auto import folder, it directs the notes into a single notebook. I would take it folder by folder, and create notebooks as you need them (remember, you have a limit of 250 of those). You should look into tags as a means of structuring as well.

 

Oh, and if you're putting personal legal stuff like divorce proceedings into Evernote, you may want to think about the fact that it's going to be synced up to the Evernote servers, unless you keep them in local (i.e. unsynced) notebooks.

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I have a directory of legal files. The directory is filled with subdirectories, each subdirectory's name follows a "YYYYMMDD - Description" and directory contains half a dozen files of correspondence to/from my attorney or motions or orders surrounding a legal issue in my divorce.

 

There are about 2 gigs of data, of which 500 Mb are text, pdf, and .doc, and the other 1.5 Mb are some large videos.

 

I would love to:

 

Import the whole thing into Evernote with one click

Get a list of which files Evernote doesn't import due to size or other restrictions

Have the directory structure recreated as a stack of notebooks

 

And the reason I want to do this is so I can

 

+ search pdfs

+ make various common tags across documents ("me", "her", "court order", "visitation", ...) stuff like that.

 

And if I can do that, I can probably throw away a large filing cabinets worth of paper!

 

Can this be done with Evernote Premium?

What is the best way to do this?

 

Thanks

 

 

You will need at least start with a Premium account, $5/month, to get 4GB upload/mo.  See Evernote Premium Account Benefits

 

To automate, you will need a script that can walk through your directory hierarchy and process your subdirectories as Notebooks (limit of 250).

And then import the files in that subdirectory into the just created EN NB.

I don't know of a Windows script that can do this, but it may exist.  Jefito and others may be able to offer some suggestions about this.

 

If you own, or can use, a Mac, then this definitely can be done using AppleScript.

 

Although it is generally suggested to new folks to use Tags rather than NBs, in your case NBs might be better.

I'm not sure Tags with long names like "YYYYMMDD - Description" would work well, and in fact, I'm not sure they would work well as NBs either.

But, if you are comfortable with having long Directory names, then NBs might be OK for you.  Just keep in mind that you have a limit of 250 NBs.

 

Before you start the mass import or automation, I'd recommend that you do a small prototype in Evernote first to see if it will work as you expect.  When finished with the prototype, you can either keep (if useful), or just delete to get a clean start.

 

You won't be able to upload the large videos.  There is a max of 100MB per Note.  I'd suggest that you just enter the full path to the video file in the form of "file:///C:\directory\videofile.ext"

 

Finally, keep in mind that Evernote does NOT encrypt your Notes or attachments.  So if you have sensitive data, then you might want to encrypt it before uploading to EN.  If your files are PDFs, this can be easily done.

 

I know this is not a full answer to all your questions, but maybe  it will help you get started.  :)

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Thanks for the replies.

 

The data is sensitive, uh, mostly to myself. Ouch, what a time it's been. But I certainly appreciate the warning about sensitive data.

 

250 notebooks and auto import not creating stacks automatically. Sorry to hear evernote is still limited that way.

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