Sharing Evernote with another user as a backup to me

[nitinmanchanda 0]

HI, I want to share the entire evernote application with my spouse, but I'm confused as to how to do this. DO I add her as another user (can I get her view only access?), or do I need to share individual notebooks (which are way too many to share). The purpose is just so that she can get to our electronic files to look up some data in case I'm not around. Thanks.

[gazumped 9,541]

Hi.  Evernote accounts are free - unless you need a lot of storage space - so why not get her another free account and keep your information in a shared notebook available to both of you?

[DTLow 5,680]

On February 25, 2016 at 2:57 PM, nitinmanchanda said:

I want to share the entire evernote application with my spouse, but I'm confused as to how to do this. DO I add her as another user (can I get her view only access?), or do I need to share individual notebooks (which are way too many to share). The purpose is just so that she can get to our electronic files to look up some data in case I'm not around.

Evernote doesn't have the "other user" option, so it looks like the shared notebook approach is what you're looking for.
There's two options

• access via another Evernote account (you can restrict to view only access)
• access via a web browser with no Evernote account (view only access)

>>share individual notebooks (which are way too many to share).
Another alternative is to give her the public link to specific notes.

[CalS 5,013]

There is a workaround if the use case is she only wants to view your notes, but it comes with some risk. 

Just put EN on her machine and use your account.  Then she will have the same access as you.  The risk exists if she makes any changes, accidentally or otherwise, and you end up with a modified note or a sync issue.  But if she doesn't' make any changes it will be fine.  FWIW and your risk tolerance.

[JMichaelTX 4,104]

On 2/25/2016 at 4:57 PM, nitinmanchanda said:

(can I get her view only access?)

do I need to share individual notebooks (which are way too many to share). The purpose is just so that she can get to our electronic files to look up some data in case I'm not around

I agree with the others that shared notebooks (with you wife's new free Evernote account) is probably the best approach.  You can share them as view/read only, or read/write.

Since you say you have too many notebooks to share, you might consider this approach:

• For each notebook, create a  pseudo notebook, which is really a tag.
  • My naming convention is ".NB." plus whatever the current NB name is.
  • So, the tag for a notebook named "Personal" would be ".NB.Personal"
  • For more info about pseudo notebooks, see:
    • Using Tags as Pseudo Notebooks
    • Do you find lots of notebooks or notebook stacks useful?
  • Assign this pseudo notebook tag to all notes in the notebook.
• After you have assigned all Notes with a pseudo notebook tag, move all of the Notes into one of the actual notebooks, as described below.
• Create one or two notebooks just for sharing (since you can't share by tag).
  • If you need to, you could create one NB for view only, and another for read/write
  • So you could end up with these actual notebooks:
    • Inbox (not shared, for processing all new notes)
    • Personal (not shared)
    • FAM.Ref (shared view only)
    • FAM.Common (shared read/write)
  • I like to use prefixes like "FAM.", for Family, to make it easy to recognize the family notebooks that are shared.
  • But you should choose tag names and notebook names that make sense to both you and your wife.
• One of the great thing about using the pseudo notebook tags, is that the same tag can be assigned to notes that are in different actual notebooks.  So, for example, you could have a ".NB.Insurance" pseudo notebook (tag) assigned to notes in Personal, FAM.Ref, and FAM.Common.  This would allow you to filter and find all of your insurance notes regardless of which actual notebook they are in.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes.