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Are Offline Notebooks Removed from Mobile Device When Turned Off


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I use Evernote on my HP laptop, my iPhone 5 running iOS 7 and my Nexus 7 tablet running KitKat 4.4.4. When I turn off a previously created offline notebook on my iPhone or tablet, is that notebook still residing/taking up storage space on my mobile devices from the original download, even if it is not accessible to me as an offline notebook, or is it somehow removed from storage, freeing up that space?

Also — a slight variation of the same question — if I am in a month of Premium using my designated offline notebook and then I return to Basic the following month, thereby losing the offline notebook functionality, does that notebook still remain on my iPhone using up storage if I do not turn off the offline notebook designation?

If the answer is that storage is still used by these notebooks once they are downloaded in the original creation of the offline notebook, that would explain why Evernote is taking up 1.2 GB on my iPhone. Should this be the case, can I copy the notes in my offline notebooks to a new "local" notebook to preserve them on my laptop before deleting the synced versions of the offline notebooks, since I don't think I can "convert" a synced notebook to a local notebook.

Thank you.

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It has never been clear to me in my usage what method EN uses to release local storage on an iPhone, either for notes downloaded or notebooks with changed designations.  The space is somehow released as other notes are accessed and syncs occur.  Net to your question, the storage will release after you change from offline status or go back to basic through your normal use of the app.

If you want to force the issue, just move your notes to a new "local" notebook.  Then sync your desktop and then the phone.  But realize this will impact your upload usage if you move the notes back to a synced notebook later (not the phone, the desktop).  So if you want to force the issue, do it before you go back to basic.

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2 hours ago, promosinc said:

When I turn off a previously created offline notebook on my iPhone or tablet, is that notebook still residing/taking up storage space on my mobile devices from the original download

My impression is the notebook is not residing/taking up storage space over time - but it may not happen right away.  Evernote maintains data in a cache and I don't know when that gets cleared.

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Thank you, both, for your responses. I'm running out of storage on my iPhone 5 -- literally just a couple of hundred MB free -- and Evernote shows as the largest app in Usage -- 1.2GB for about 6,000 notes, a combination of web clips, text documents and PDFs, not terribly 'ginormous' notes. Trying to figure out if that is a normal amount of space for Evernote Basic to use on an iPhone to store headers, etc. -- or if the 'leftover' offline notebooks are inflating my usage. I usually create Travel Notebooks when I'm going overseas, sign up for a month of Premium and make them offline notebooks. I don't need them after I return home, but still would like to preserve the notes in case I travel to the same location in the future, hence the question about creating and moving to a local notebook.

From your responses, though, it sounds like Evernote would have released this storage a long time ago, as I haven't traveled since last October. The travel notebooks are sizeable, usually 400+ notes.

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26 minutes ago, promosinc said:

Do you think just clearing cache would help?

For sure - that should be one of the first options; not just for Evernote.  it can clear various problems.

Evernote > Settings > Support > Clear Cache

 

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My understanding is that by default notes are NOT downloaded to mobile devices because of the often limited local storage such devices have.  If you're sure that you have enough storage it's possible to flag notebooks as 'offline searchable',  when those individual notes are downloaded to the device;  but otherwise only local temporary storage is used,  as and when it is available.  Evernote does keep recent notes in temporary storage so as to make them available more quickly than by downloading the entire content;  that availability is not guaranteed however - the notes would be deleted from temporary storage if the space were required by another app.

If you have any space concerns,  just uninstall Evernote and restart your device.  Reinstall Evernote.  You now have a minimal installation.  Clear the Evernote cache (via settings) from time to time to keep it that way.

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8 hours ago, promosinc said:

When I turn off a previously created offline notebook on my iPhone or tablet, is that notebook still residing/taking up storage space on my mobile devices from the original download, even if it is not accessible to me as an offline notebook, or is it somehow removed from storage, freeing up that space?

As soon as you remove the EN iOS Offline Notebooks, Evernote will designate the storage used by them as "available" to the iOS system.  However, iOS may not claim the space immediately, and thus the storage will show as being "used by" Evernote in the iOS Settings > General > Manage Storage section.

When there is a need for additional storage by the system or any app, the iOS will claim some or all of this "available" storage.

8 hours ago, promosinc said:

If the answer is that storage is still used by these notebooks once they are downloaded in the original creation of the offline notebook, that would explain why Evernote is taking up 1.2 GB on my iPhone. Should this be the case, can I copy the notes in my offline notebooks to a new "local" notebook to preserve them on my laptop before deleting the synced versions of the offline notebooks, since I don't think I can "convert" a synced notebook to a local notebook.

You need not, and should not, take any action to copy or move Notes that were in your EN iOS Offline Notebooks.

The notes there are just a COPY, and when the Offline Storage is removed, it will have NO effect on your sync'd Notebooks.

8 hours ago, promosinc said:

that would explain why Evernote is taking up 1.2 GB on my iPhone.

That is quite high.  I have 15,000+ Notes, with about 130 in Offline Notebooks, and my iPhone 6+ shows Evernote using only 135MB of storage.  Perhaps you had some large Notes and/or large attachments in your Offline Storage.  But as I mentioned above, after you have removed (moved the switch to OFF) the Offline Notebooks in EN iOS, the iOS system will reclaim that space when it needs to do so.

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My iPad shows Evernote at 265MB which is surprising in that I have over 2GB of data Offline
My guess is that EN is hiding this offline storage as Cache.
Turning off the Offline Notebooks had no effect on storage.
Clearing the cache did not impact the Evernote Storage figure, however my total storage used dropped over 3GB

I'm thinking Clearing the cache (or reinstalling Evernote) will sort out the storage issue.
 

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It looks like Evernote was holding my offline notebooks in cache on my iPhone, but not on my Android Nexus 7 tablet. I just cleared cache on my iPhone 5 with major results.

Here's what it looked like before and after I cleared cache on my iPhone:

On my iPhone 5 running iOS 7 and Evernote 7.7.11, I had only 272 MB of available storage; Evernote usage was 1.2 GB of which Evernote Documents & Data was 1.0 GB. However, on my Nexus 7 tablet running KitKat 4.4.4, data usage for Evernote was only 4.49 MB with the app using 211 MB. Previously I had created three large offline notebooks with 287, 368 and 488 notes respectively, so they were quite large. When I returned to Basic after my trips, they would no longer have been offline notebooks and I did go in and manually turn off the 'offline notebooks' indicators in each app as well. However, it looks like Evernote held on to them in my iPhone's cache. After clearing cache on my iPhone Evernote app, I now have 1.2 GB of available storage and Evernote usage dropped to 185 MB, in third place after Photos and Mail.

Many thanks to all of you for your insightful suggestions!! I may now have freed up enough storage to upgrade to iOS 9, although I am nervous about upgrading an older phone to a new OS. I was on the verge of buying a new phone because my iPhone could not even perform a successful backup to iCloud.

JMichaelTX, you cautioned against copying or moving notes from these formerly offline travel notebooks. My thinking was that if I copy them to a newly created local notebook and then delete the synced notebooks, the information would just be stored on my laptop. Most likely I will not need to reference these notebooks again, unless I travel to the same place. I thought that by putting them in a local notebook and then deleting the synced versions, there would be fewer notes to search when I am on my mobile devices. I think there must be a fallacy in my thinking from what you have written, but I'm not sure fully understand. Could you elaborate?

Again, I am most grateful for the kind assistance you have all offered me. I learned a great deal.

 

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Off the top I would not trust the EN usage statistics in IOS.  At one point I had 5GB of EN data on my phone and the amount shown on the phone for EN was 150MB.

I agree with @gazumped, easy fix is to remove/reinstall EN on your phone, particularly if you don't have any large offline notebooks at the moment.  It doesn't take that long to download the headers.  And you don't have to move any notes around.

Another place to look for storage usage is iCloud.  I actually turned off all offline notebooks because for some reason they were be including in my iCloud backups in an ever expanding fashion, even though EN was not checked.  Bug reports to Apple and EN with no solution.  It happened to me after IOS 9.  So at this point I just download a note whenever needed (I'm not out of wifi or cell coverage that often so not so painful for me).  FWIW.

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9 hours ago, promosinc said:

I thought that by putting them in a local notebook and then deleting the synced versions, there would be fewer notes to search when I am on my mobile devices. I think there must be a fallacy in my thinking from what you have written, but I'm not sure fully understand. Could you elaborate?

Technically, you are correct, of course, that if you move notes from sync'd notebooks to local notebooks (on your PC or Mac), then number of notes to search on the iOS device has been reduced.  However, I don't think you would see a material difference in search speed on the iOS device.  I have 15,000+ notes, and search on my iPhone 6+ is near instantaneous.  I'm running EN iOS 7.10 on iOS 9.2.1.  Even on mobile devices, indexed database searches are very fast these days.

Evernote publishes a max of 100,000 notes in its system limits document.  I've never seen them even suggest that iOS devices would have a lower limit.  Of course, all data on iOS devices (as well as Mac and PCs) is limited by the amount of permanent storage the device has available.

So I would not bother with moving notes to Local Notebooks until you actually encounter search performance issues on your iOS device.

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