PinkElephant

Just a little story about my personal experience: A while ago I managed a department where a sort of tagging was going on to classify information, day by day. About 100.000 entries were created and tagged every year. We had a discussion about the tagging quality, about whether there should be more tags for some rare cases that were difficult to structure etc., and made an analysis of the database. There were about 3.500 possible tags in the given structure. Out of these, about 700 were used in real life. There were about 50 people actively tagging. Nobody used individually more than 300 tags. The majority used between 80 and 150. The 700 in total resulted from the fact that the same issue was tagged differently by different people contributing to the database. After this, we shifted focus from the tagging of the exceptions to a better standard of the day-to-day tagging. We actually got better by reducing the number of actively used tags. The exceptions were treated as such, not as reasons to complicate the tagging structure. When the structure was revised later, we axed a complete level of the nesting structure. Transfer: The more tags you create, the less likely you will use all relevant ones when searching. I do not think there exists a "right" number of tags, but cleaning the existing tag-base out from time to time IMHO sounds like a reasonable house keeping job. When you find a tag with few entries, and is is existing since quite a while, why not ask yourself whether it should continue to exist.

Yes, to collect the notes this searching is quite similar to what I do. My special tagging takes place after the work is done. For reference reasons, I want to know which notes were in each of the shared folders created through the years. Since I delete the folder after the tax declaration for a year is done, I tag the notes in there, then I archive everything in a huge archive notebook, then I delete the shared notebook. By this, I can always reproduce the content of the shared notebook even after the sharing is done and forgotten. German tax laws are very complex, and sometimes I need to check something years later. In these days, I have got a tax refund for the years 2009 and 2010, because some legal action by somebody else has run its course to the final court, and the ruling was positive for the taxpayer. If your tax declaration contained the relevant docs, and your accountant kept it open with the tax authorities, you will get the refund even 10 years later. In situations like these, it makes sense to be able to find all the docs that were filed in 2009. Nice argument to keep everything with a service that will not forget, and makes retrieval as easy as EN does.

The only reason I use a tag like „Taxes-2015“ is when I had created a notebook with all the docs and shared it with my accountant. After the tax work is done, I will dissolve this shared notebook. To know what was in there, I create a tag like „Taxes-YYYY“ and assign it to all notes that were shared. The I move them out of the shared notebook, mostly into an archive, and delete the now empty notebook. But this is not a nested tag, it is one for each occasion when I want to be able to reproduce what was in a share without sticking with that particular notebook forever. When putting a ZZZ in front of the tags text, it will be moved to the end of all tags, and out of reach for daily work.

Maybe it would be the right moment to check which tags have a low or even zero usage. And then retag the notes with similar tags used more often, and delete the rarely used tags from the notes. When on zero usage, delete them. Maybe you could get rid of 1/3 or even 1/2 of the tags because they are not needed.

Would be nice, so you have my support on this. As a workaround, you can write the date as plain text into the note. It will be searchable as such, if you always use the same format.

Are you only on the web, or using a desktop client as well ? On the assumption that there was content lost on the cloud server (which only happens when it was deleted by the user, often accidentally). The cloud server is the master file of your EN data. But the Desktop clients (Win, Mac) hold their own database. If you stop syncing (easiest way is take the machine off the internet, by detaching the Ethernet cable and/or switching off WLAN) BEFORE opening EN, a local copy will most likely be available. It is possible to retrieve it from there. Same with the mobile apps, if and only when the notebook containing the note was declared „offline“ and the EN app had not been opened before. Here go to flight mode before opening the EN app to avoid synchronizing. In both cases, a local copy of the note must be created by you and the EN client must be closed to save everything before connecting again to the internet. Then the „twin“ of the copy will be synced to the cloud database. if the desktop client was already synced, you have one more chance - but only if you have a backup created before the note was deleted, and the local database is included in the backup. Then you can retrieve the backup of the EN database from the backup file, and again create a copy of the note like described above. How to retrieve depends on the backup software and setup you are using. If you do not know, get professional help, if the note is important enough to pay the professional you will need. And if you do not backup your machine, you should think about changing this any time soon. No backup, no pity ....

One more aspect to this: On the mobile apps (at least on the iOS-app) the nesting is lost. There is a plain list of tags, with the nesting parents right beside the nesting siblings. You find "Tax-2019" as a tag if it is in one tag, but if you create a nested "tax.2019" (the point separates the parent from the sibling), you will find both as separate tags. If you are working in a mixed environment of desktop and mobile clients, nesting is of very limited use. The search logic that works for both is what was posted by DGW right on top of my posting. And I think it is better to put the search logic into the searching part, not into the fixed data given to the notes once and for all. If you want to search more complex issues frequently, create the searches and store them for further use. There is a good help article from EN explaining the search logic, including all options. Much more powerful than any nesting strategy, be it notebooks or tags. https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313828-How-to-use-Evernote-s-advanced-search-syntax Another article on saving searches: https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005267-How-to-create-a-saved-search

The humor is quite black, but I like the fix.

The number of notes seems to be not relevant. Anyhow, the iOS (and the Android) app does not load the notes to the device. It only loads previews, and will load the note fresh from the server when you try to open one. When closed, it will write it back to the server, and open the next one picked (always one at a time). It does not change when the notes are loaded for offline use. My iOS app freezes when there is something in the search field AND when I switch apps leaving EN open in the background. Under this conditions, it is frozen when I reopen it. You can not even delete the search string that IMHO causes the freezing. When I quit the app, and reopen it, it will react as normal. For me this is a nuisance, sort of restart huddle caused by the search text. I have a support ticket open on this. They came back with a mountain of questions I had no time up to now to answer.

Sounds good to me - enjoy the free space. Always good to have some for new projects. Maybe you want to send a support ticket, why those older versions piled up, and how to avoid it.

Why „clean out“ ? If you are a developer, you may want to refer to older versions, for debugging user requests for example. Typically you will run the corresponding OS in a virtual machine, to allow multiple environments to be tested in parallel. If you are not a developer, why bother ?

Took a look as well. Notion seems stronger in building workflows and cockpits / dashboards. Looks nicer, GUI is more flexible. But I have not found the massive, reliable data silo with good-to-perfect retrieval I need for my usecase. So for me it is EN for the next future. This is plainly personal, others may evaluate features differently, and everybody has an own usecase to support.

Yes, sure it is, but I would rather avoid to project the EN screen to the caves walls ... the humidity will kill the gadgets before you’re done.

Nice job ! When I decide to post edited screen shots, I do the editing on my iPad with Apple Pencil. Works fast & gets the job done 😎

@Nick L. : If I am using a web-based interface, I completely agree that creating duplicates is far better than losing information. Luckily I am usually running on Win10, MacOS or iOS, so up to now I was not flooded by security duplicates. It would be good if this feature could be assisted by a tool that can be used to get rid of the unwanted twin notes in an economical way. Sort of another entry into the „extended help menu“ ? Pick the notes, present the youngest one of them all and let the user confirm that it contains all the information; then delete all the earlier copies ?