Massive Evernote cleaning, how to start over from scratch

[GreyGray 15]

Hello, 

 

I spent a week working in EN and cleaned things up, managed my tags and notebooks etc.  I moved a lot of stuff around.  I noticed weeks later, the peratory folder is holding hundreds of items.  I am waiting for them to delete automatically on it's schedule, but they aren't.

 

What is the schedule, is it a launch item or cron or internal to the app?

 

If I want to start clean, or say I got a new computer, I know I can simply login and it will download from the web all my data.  However, what about local notebooks, how do I get them over, and what if data from a local notebook is linked in some way to that of a non local one?  Will the download of the non local notebooks and then the ultimate restore of local ones will re-hook up the links from one note to another?  

 

I honestly don't know the linking capabilities of Evernote very well, so this may not even matter.  There may no the a way to link one note to the other, though i swear I have in the past, linked a reminder to another note or something to that effect.

 

Can someone tell me the steps to go from the web store Mac version to a full clean reinstall to a new machine?

 

Can someone also share with me all the locations of Evernote where it reads and writes data to as well as what they do, what are caches and safe to delete, etc.  I have GB's of EB data locally, but only a few hundred MB in the cloud.  And only 2-4 local notebooks, both of which only hold small amounts of data, nothing that could pop it up that high.  There is ghost or stale data that needs cleaning, but I don't know what is safe and what is not.

 

Thank you.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

@GreyGray:

 

If you want to "clear out the unneeded stuff", or setup a clean install of Evernote on another Mac, it's pretty simple:

1. Export all Local NBs to ENEX
   
   1. check to include Tags 
      
   2. 1 NB per ENEX
      
   3. save to an external drive
      
   
   
2. To be extra safe, do a TM backup of your Mac Evernote folder
   
3. Do a manual sync, and check the Activity log for any errors
   
4. Verify all of your sync'd Notes are in the EN Cloud using the EN Web client
   
5. To remove everything Evernote related on your existing Mac, use an app uninstaller like AppDelete.
   
   1. Make sure the app uninstaller can see and delete hidden files/folders.
      
   
   
6. Restart the existing Mac, or boot up the new Mac
   
7. Download EN Mac from the Evernote.com site, and install
   
8. Depending on how large your account is, give the new install a few hours to complete download of sync'd NBs
   
9. When things have calmed down, import the ENEX files of your Local NBs from Step #1.
   

One issue with ENEX export/import that everyone should be aware of is that you will lose information in this process:

1. All Note Links to any of the Notes in the ENEX are broken, lost, and will have to be recreated.
   
2. The ENEX files do not contain any Notebook data.
   
3. When you Import the ENEX file, the Note Created Date is lost, and set to the current date/time.
   
4. To preserve Tags in the ENEX files, you must check the checkbox to include Tags during both the export and import process
   
5. Tag hierarchy is not preserved.  If you had one, it will need to be recreated after the import process
   
6. If the ENEX files came from Sync'd Notebooks,
   
   1. the Sync'd NB will have to be recreated, and the import of the ENEX Notes moved into the appropriate NB.
      
   2. Moving these Notes into Sync'd NBs will go against your monthly upload allowance
      
   
   

 

REF:  How to back up (export) and restore (import) notes and notebooks

[GreyGray 15]

 

One issue with ENEX export/import that everyone should be aware of is that you will lose information in this process:

1. All Note Links to any of the Notes in the ENEX are broken, lost, and will have to be recreated.
2. The ENEX files do not contain any Notebook data.
3. When you Import the ENEX file, the Note Created Date is lost, and set to the current date/time.
4. To preserve Tags in the ENEX files, you must check the checkbox to include Tags during both the export and import process
5. Tag hierarchy is not preserved.  If you had one, it will need to be recreated after the import process
6. If the ENEX files came from Sync'd Notebooks,
   1. the Sync'd NB will have to be recreated, and the import of the ENEX Notes moved into the appropriate NB.
   2. Moving these Notes into Sync'd NBs will go against your monthly upload allowance

 

REF:  How to back up (export) and restore (import) notes and notebooks

 

 

Thanks JM,

 

To be honest, the above is probably a good but report list.  Technically, I would say there is no way to export and restore to what I would call a backup scenario.  assuming I did not want to go the clean everything up route, is there a way to just move the data from one machine to another, and put it all in the right place?  Is there a forum post somewhere that lists all the file paths, what they do, and which ones are needed and not?

 

I am not willing to lose so much as what you listed above.  I don't do a lot of inner note linking, so I can get over that, but tags out of order, no notebook support, exporting each notebook separately, and those exports aren't even a clone of the real data.

 

When you sync an empty EN client to the web data, do you lose anything, or is it all maintained?  Aside from local notebooks of course.

 

Any app that is pushed as a place to put all your important stuff, pushing you to put it in the cloud, certainly when making a new notebook they warn you, local notebooks are not preferred.  In that case, there should absolutely be a way to export and import in one go and have a perfect copy of what you last left off with without the cruft.  I am surprised this is not possible.  If a dev is reading this, I would love to see this as a feature.  Even more than that though, is encryption, then I would feel much better and perhaps you could even remove the local notebooks feature.  Though you may have to rethink your data rate charges, as they are a little out of touch in my opinion when you look at what AWS charges for bandwidth, and given than I am near 1005 positive inbound bandwidth is free to AWS and most providers.  Plus, you could use cloud flare or cloud front and reduce bandwidth even further.  I am sure there are a ton of commonalities in some of the binary image data.

 

Thanks JM, good to know.  For the time being, looks like I will keep cleaning and make a decision when I buy a new machine.  Thank you.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Thanks JM, good to know.  For the time being, looks like I will keep cleaning and make a decision when I buy a new machine.  Thank you.

 

As you wish.  I suspect that the time and effort to do manual cleaning will far exceed the process I described above.

 

There is really nothing lost, except for note links to Notes in the Local NBs.