I had an experience like this recently. I had trouble opening an encrypted note and somehow in the process of trying to sign in, I must have deleted the text with backspace. The encrypted note didn't appear in the trash, in any case. A day or so later I remembered my travel laptop also had Evernote installed so I opened it up and before signing in I turned off wi-fi. Then I signed in, opened Evernote, and my encrypted note was there. I copied it in Word, saved the info on a thumbdrive, and copied it back to my desktop.