adword

Aha! It seems we were on different wavelengths for a bit. You see, Evernote on that 10-year-old iPad Air 2 (bless its little circuits!) behaves differently than on newer devices. On older hardware, background tasks get put on hold pretty quickly once the screen goes dark. In your case, the Evernote database needed some reorganizing, which took some time. Since background tasks were getting paused, keeping the iPad awake was the only way to let Evernote finish the job. It might not be the most elegant solution, but it did the trick! On newer devices, things work a bit smoother, so that workaround wouldn't be necessary.