Mike DM

@PinkElephant Thank you for the suggestion! I hadn't thought of that and I was hopeful that might solve the mystery. Unfortunately, it didn't. I finally uninstalled and reinstalled the app, and it behaved as expected upon the first attempt. No idea what may have caused the glitch, considering that I haven't updated anything on the phone for at least a week. I appreciate your help on this forum.

Should I start a new topic for this? Yesterday on my Android v14 phone, Evernote signed me out for no apparent reason and now refuses to move beyond the first sign-in screen. I have used both my username and my email address, and when I click the Continue button, nothing happens. I rebooted the phone but that didn't change anything (as I expected). BTW, I have never logged out of Evernote on my phone since I bought the phone about 2 yrs ago. I've rebooted the phone many times, of course, and Evernote has always stayed logged in. It would appear that uninstalling/reinstalling is the only next thing to try, but I'm not hopeful about that either. I am still logged in on my Win 10 laptop. I also just verified that the web portal is working on the laptop via the Chrome browser. I did lose access a few days ago on my Android 6 or 7 tablet, but I expected that because of the v10 forced update.

It was not missing on Legacy the last time I looked, and I'm 90% certain that I even had viewed it on my Android phone, which has been running the Android version of V10 for some time now. Like you, I wanted a backup plan, but I chose not to attempt to run them side by side. Instead, I chose to try to create a disaster recovery plan. I knew that for a few more days, I would be able to reinstall legacy if needed, and I have a separate old desktop machine running Win 7 that I keep off the internet. I figured that in a worst case scenario (if still necessary after March 23rd) I could move Legacy there, export notebooks as needed, send those back to my laptop, and import them. The Ctrl+Shift+E was suggested by @KoZz in a thread you linked here. Everything else that I'd read previously suggested that I'd have to export them one by one. That shortcut exported every notebook, in one process! Yay! It didn't keep the notebook stacking structure, but I don't think the hard way would have either. Good luck!

Ha - you didn't. I was referring to myself, and I definitely overstated. I continued to be full of fear. Actually, I felt exactly like you: hated that it was happening. I do get it though, things evolve and we must, too - whether by sticking with Evernote or moving elsewhere. For now anyway, I stuck with Evernote. Thanks for the advice. I'll check as soon as I can. Not hopeful, since the tablet hasn't asked to update, but I'll at least try. My major concern, of course, was updating the Windows version. I did, after following good advice from various members of this community, including yourself. I would give credit to the others here, but I've read so much in the last 2 days that my head is swimming. I exported all notebooks with the excellent keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+E as a precaution, then copied my database folder as a precaution, took screenshots of my folder and tags structures within the Legacy app, held my breath, and hit the button. It went pretty well, but not flawlessly. Right away, I found a note that was missing an image. I had taken a photo of a small drawing that I had made on scratch paper and added to the note along with some text maybe 2 weeks ago. I was a bit unusual in the fact that the transferred image barely recognized the edges of the small piece of scratch paper. When the image appeared in Evernote, it almost looked as though I had drawn it there. Barely an edge to the image. The original photo was taken of the scratch paper lying on a deeply contrasting background. I may have used the Scan function. Can't remember. After the update today, it was missing! I gave it plenty of time, as you and others have suggested, but I was able to view many other notes with photos, PDFs, linked Word docs, etc. Really, it was a huge success, overall! So far, just that one missing image, and I was able to pull a copy from Dropbox Camera Uploads to replace it. No other errors that I can find, so far. My thanks to you, and the many others who've contributed their time and knowledge to this forum.

@PinkElephant, I have to respect your much greater knowledge of Evernote and its versions. But I have to agree with @justacat about the desire to have untampered access to old notes for awhile. I guess it's because I don't want to just trust that everything will come through intact. It wouldn't be my first experience of a broken tech promise, or of learning things the hard way. For example, right now I have an older Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 tablet running Android 7 that I mainly bought to hang on the kitchen wall so that I could see recipes in Evernote as I worked. The Evernote v8.13.3 running on it is telling me that it will stop working on March 23rd and I must update now, but clicking the link takes me to an evernote.com page that says to use Google Play to get it. However, Google Play doesn't show updating as an option (nor does the Updates piece of the tablet OS). Don't get me wrong, I know that old OS's eventually become obsolete, and the software you used on them with it. I just wish I could have predicted the big change to Evernote when I bought the tablet - shortly before the big change first happened. I spent $300 on that thing... So are you saying that the installation of v10 leaves the existing EXB file(s) alone? I'm really confused about how the conversion alters the user database - or doesn't. Can you explain your statement some? To your feeling that there is a lot of "much ado about nothing" (not your quote, obviously), if the experience of @justacat can be expected for most people (if using his tweaks), I agree with you! That experience was the business of being able to install v10 on top of v6x as mentioned below: However, most of the forum posts I've read, starting months ago, and of course, everything Evernote corporate says, runs counter to that - making users like me confused and concerned. If I were convinced that I could do as @justacat did, I could move forward without fear. But everybody seems to be saying that v10 will not just uninstall your Legacy version but permanently alter your database as well. True? Or not? Note: I am currently running 6.25.1.9091 just as @justacat was, based on previous advice from this forum, and I have the .exe file safely tucked away.

I'll have to take your word on that, but not today - ha! Thank you, though. Thank you. I am now pretty certain that I never made any local notebooks.

@agsteele, thank you. That is sound advice. I never considered that they would rebuild from the server rather than my own EXB file. Makes sense, of course. Ugh! You just reminded me of why I was avoiding V10 in the first place. What you are saying is that in spite of Evernote management having redundancy processes in place, having just the one database stored on their servers is a data loss risk. I have to agree. A number of years ago, Verizon (cell svc provider in the US) lost my data stored in their Verizon Cloud service. I know damn well they had an archive that they could have restored me from, but I could never get past the low level front line personnel to even a manager. They lost me as a customer FOREVER. They eventually phased out their cloud service - perhaps because of so much bad management? I appreciate the pointer to what appears to be a very useful tool on GitHub, and I'll bookmark that, but for me, that will require a lot of time also (learning curve). I hope to have more time in about a year. I think my plan for now will be to follow your first advice, then place a backup copy of my EXB file into the same folder that I have the installer file for Legacy 6x, and hope they don't lose my data until I can spend the time to do the GitHub thing. If they do, I'll have lost whatever I added since the conversion. I'm pretty sure I never created any local notebooks. How exactly might I check? See my first post.

In the interests of my shortage of time, I've decided to proceed with updating my Windows Desktop legacy version (6.x) to V10x. On this page: https://evernote.com/blog/legacy-decommissioning it says that it's a good idea to back up each notebook to ENEX files before proceeding. Item 3 says this: Back up your notes. Consider backing up all your notes as ENEX files before updating. As a best practice, we recommend exporting notes on a per notebook basis: it’s faster than going note-by-note, yet ensures that you can easily re-upload any content back into Evernote without exceeding the monthly upload limits (which might happen if you used a bulk exporter plug-in to export one massive file). That will take a lot of work, obviously. I have my Windows machine doing nightly backups (using Macrium Reflect, FYI), so do any advanced users have opinions on whether I should bother to proceed with what I currently perceive to be a waste of time? If the conversion failed or produced a corrupted database, couldn't I uninstall V10, replace my EXB file with my latest backup and do over? I'm thinking that they wrote those instructions for the millions of users who don't do regular backups of their precious data. Worst case scenario: that also fails, due to something about my current EXB file. I reinstall the legacy version (which I have a copy of) and THEN follow their suggested process? 2nd question: I'm pretty sure that I never created any "local notebooks". How can I be sure? In the ...\Evernote\Databases folder, I have only the one main EXB file that holds my database. It's about 878 MB. Should I look elsewhere for the "local notebook" file? Does it use a different file extension?

@AlbertR: Thank you for your informed opinion! Also a huge thank you for the effort that you've put into your EN10 Missing Features article! (see his signature line for a link to it) It answers some of the important questions I had regarding what started this thread back in late 2020 - missing core features - and/or UI changes that were seen as negatives. There are still many - as you have so painstakingly detailed! Now I know without the exasperation and time cost (or time-soaks, as @gazumped eloquently put it) that I don't yet want to invest the time in trying v10 again. Not now. I'm too overwhelmed with other work for beta testing, which, in spite of the improvements they have made in EN10 since the initial release, does still amount to that for me. @gazumped, I haven't forgotten the wisdom of your suggestion to try to begin using v10 before I have no other choice. It's sound! But at this moment, I'm going to take my chances that they won't somehow torpedo Legacy before I've had time to learn v10. If they do, I'll decide my course of action then, as I do with so many things these days. I seem to be in the business of putting out fires, with little time for sensible planning ahead. All of you that have posted recently (or along this whole thread, for that matter) have given me valuable information that I will come back to at the right time. I'm sure that it will be helpful to many others who have questions as well! My gratitude to each of you. Michael

Thank you both for those informative replies! @PinkElephant, the install process now makes sense. It also now makes sense that I should only use the version given in the link earlier, because it's likely coded specifically to allow itself to be installed alongside the new version without ***** things up. And of course, they also coded it so that it will appear gray to help distinguish it from the other one. I'm 95% sure that I never created any unsynced notebooks. How might I tell for sure before I potentially erase them? BTW: I recall now that I did install the new v10 back in July of 2021 (or near), and I hated it as much as all the other posters who left their thoughts in this thread. the biggest thing that I hated was the glacial pace of the app on my laptop. I'm using the same machine today, and I have really slow internet. I wonder if speed is still a major complaint? I know it was one of the complaints back in 2020 when @gazumped started this thread. @agsteele: Thanks for the directory location. I have a backup of the laptop run each night, to a NAS. So I guess the "local copy" business is becoming less important. Since @PinkElephant said that v10 still allows export to HTML, I think that the bases are now covered - there is still an escape hatch with your data if need be.

@gazumped Thank you for the informative reply! I downloaded a copy of the legacy version accessed via the page you linked back in July of 2021 (I think). At that time, it was a slightly lower version number than that page has now (which I am currently downloading). Do you have any reason to think that the current version 10.xx would clash with my current version 6.25.1.9091? I ask because I agree with @PinkElephant to not fix things that aren't broken, so updating to what the developers now are calling the last Legacy version adds one more layer of complexity to the business of attempting to install and run v10 next to my Legacy version. So besides asking you to guess whether my version 6.25.1.9091 could run alongside a v10, I'm also wondering if what you are saying is that v10 does NOT update the Legacy EXB database; that when you install v10 it apparently imports the old database and then works strictly off the new cloud database? Also, @PinkElephant, I'm confused: you say that v10 keeps a local copy. When this forum thread got started, everyone said it didn't. Has that changed? Can you tell me the storage location of the v10 local copy and the file extension name? @gazumped, your paragraph advising me to try using both NOW, and all the logic that went with it has convinced me to do what I did NOT plan to do. @PinkElephant misunderstood me. I wasn't planning to do anything now; I just wanted to see what had changed over time, and see if I might be forced to change anytime soon. I really don't need more tech work right now. But your advice is wise, so I'll proceed to install a copy of v10 soon. I'll make a backup of my EXB file just prior. So if you download and install a v10, it doesn't overwrite vital files? I just can't comprehend that it wouldn't. Do people install it to a different directory to keep things from getting broken?

I know that this is now a very old topic, but I'm hoping that some of the people who commented before will see this. I saw this thread back in mid 2021 and made notes to myself to avoid moving past the Evernote for Windows version I was on (6.25.1.9091). Just recently, Evernote for Windows gave me a pop-up warning that I needed to update immediately to implement important security updates (or something like that). I was able to close the pop-up and continue working, but it concerned me that a forced upgrade may be coming, so I came back here to see the latest posts and ask questions. Are people still able to use the new and legacy versions side by side, and if so, how did you install the newer version without it over-writing the old one? Also, what does the newer version(s) do with your treasured database? Do both versions update the database as you work? I don't understand how this can happen when the newer version doesn't support a local database (or am I misunderstanding something?). It's time to renew my subscription (with a price increase), and my fear is that I will somehow soon be faced with figuring out how to migrate to another service or lose access to the database of notes that I've accumulated. The only reason that I originally committed to using Evernote was the assurance that my database could be stored locally AND that I could export all notes to html in the event that they changed the software negatively or went out of business. They really do have us by the gonads in this regard. I've never tried it, but I'm sure that converting my enex file to html files would be a mess (but way better than losing all your notes). So how about those questions? Thank you, Mike

@pavank Thank you! I was unaware of Apkmirror. Thank heavens they exist! I started looking for alternatives to Evernote (and I'll keep looking when I have time). Words cannot describe how much I detest version 10! Buggy beyond belief and slow as watching paint dry! What were these people thinking? That thing isn't even good enough to call a Beta version! And to Evernote decision makers: Do you think your users are such lonely people that they need an app to tell them "Good Morning ********" at the expense of a considerably slower user experience? Evernote users are BUSY PEOPLE, and don't need your app to be a new friend!!!