Sharing notes with Work and Home

[SS34 1]

I am trying to find the best way to protect my personal information on Evernote when at work.  I have a premium EN account with substantial work and personal information.  Until very recently, I used my own laptop with my client.  Thus, I kept all notes in one premium EN account. I now have a company-issued laptop and would really like to continue using this account w/o making my personal notes accessible to the employer.  It is company owned property, and they therefore have the right to access whatever is on the hard drive.  While my work and personal notes are somewhat segregated by folder, I use a single to-do system with tags.  So I like to keep everything together.

 

On to my question, is there a way to "lock" certain folders or otherwise keep my entire EV account encrypted or locked?  I have no problem with making work notes open, but would really rather not have them access family and personal stuff.  

 

Techniques I have tried or thought about:

 

1. Use the web browser client at work.  I have used the web browser client, but that does not have everything I need (sorting on tags, dragging files into folders to create new notes, etc.).  I made pretty extensive use of the client software.

 

2. I thought about creating a separate free EN account to use at work.  Then I could share my work folders between the two accounts.  I'm not sure if this will keep all my tags in sync?

 

3. Encryption.  I read up on it and it appears that you have to encrypt the contents of each note individually.  I don't think that is practical.

 

4. Logging Off.  I could off course log off, but I keep Evernote open and use it all day long.

 

I have read several posts in this forum and didn't come across anything else.  I welcome any ideas.

 

Thanks!

[jefito 5,589]

I just use two accounts, one for home, and one for work. Then I only share the notebooks that I really need across to the other account. I have duplicated tags, and Evernote doesn't really handle them well in the UI, but search works fine, so that's good enough for me.

[SS34 1]

jefito - thanks for your response.  Of the four options I listed, I think that has the most promise.  I'll give it a whirl.

[jefito 5,589]

Just be aware that you may be limited in the number of writable shared notebooks you can share from a free account. It used to be none, then it was one, and now I don't know. It's unlimited for a premium account. I'd plan for one, but try more. I'll try to run a test myself, if I get a chance. The number of read-only shared notebooks is unlimited in a free account.

[SS34 1]

jefito - OK, good to know.  My personal account is Premium and my work account will be free.  I'm not sure if that will make a difference in terms of sharing, but I appreciate the heads up.

[jefito 5,589]

My setup is the same. My personal account accumulates personal stuff, obviously, but also general documentation and reference that could be used for any particular job I work at (software development). My work account is primarily for my current company's projects, HR stuff, etc; mainly stuff I could cut loose if I were to leave (no plans on doing so, but things happen). One writable notebook for my work account seems to suffice for me.

[SS34 1]

So I setup a new work account today and shared folders from my home account.  Overall it is OK.  I can use the folders and the tags (very important to me) came over.  It is better than using the web interface.  The only 3 issues I encountered:

 

1. I cannot organize the tags that have been inherited from my home account (i.e., can't create the same hierarchy of tabs I have in my home account).  This isn't a huge deal, just slightly less convenient.

 

2. This is a little more strange.  In my home account, I can assign any tag to any folder.  In my work account, some tags are limited to a single shared notebook.  I cannot assign an existing tag to a new note because it's in the "wrong folder" (?).  Other tags can be assigned across shared notebooks.  I have a hunch on why this is happening, but this is definitely a bug.

 

3. Finally, some tags came over to the work EN instance that are not used in any shared notes.  EN correctly shows that zero notes have these tags.  However, I cannot delete them.

 

Overall, I think this is an acceptable solution, despite some of the minor bugs.  I hope EN continues to evolve the sharing function.

[jefito 5,589]

Yeah, the tags thing can be a bit bothersome. I don't really depend on any particular tag structure (I generally just keep the tag tree closed, and my tags are pretty stable at this point), so it all works out pretty well for me. Occasionally I get bit by not being able to create a new tag for a note in a shared notebook, but if I really need to do that, I can use the web client for that (or at least until they broke it a couple of days ago -- I'm sure it will be back). 

 

The thing about tags and shared notebooks that I really don't care for is how the UI treats tags that exist in both accounts. It tends to show both in the UI, even though there's no way to tell them apart externally, and there's no functional difference with regard to note filtering. Just doesn't seem quite fully baked.