I have a somewhat large and complicated Evernote database that is growing everyday. My anxiety regarding backups is also growing everyday. In the following paragraphs I have listed what I think I understand about the backup situation in Evernote. I know the Evernote servers are backed up and through the syncing process can restore a copy of the most recent data lost when a PC is stolen for example. However, call me a pessimist but I prefer to never, ever, rely only on a vendor's web server backup procedures to protect my data and sometimes there are good reasons to want to restore an entire database back to a previous point in time.
Please correct any misunderstandings I may have:
1. For trivial databases Evernote has you covered. If your database is just one "notebook" consisting of a continuous list of notes, no matter how many, you can simply export to the ENEX file format and should you ever need to restore your database from the ENEX file you'll get everything back just the way it was. Great.
2. If you are a premium subscriber and need to restore a specific note to a previous state you can probably do that using the version history feature. Great.
3. For complicated databases with many notebooks and stacked notebooks however, the restore situation is quite different. You'll get all of your text and images back, but you will lose all of the organization of your database . All of your notes, regardless of what notebook they were in originally and how those notebooks were stacked, will be restored in the same notebook called "Imported Notes" and it will be up to you to manually recreate all of your separate notebooks, manually move each note back to its original notebook, and to manually recreate how the notebooks were stacked. Yikes!
4. Whether you backup the Evernote database folders on your PC with backup software or manually export ENEX files, the situation during a restore is ultimately exactly the same. Either option involves creating an ENEX file and losing the organizational structure of your original database during the restore. If you simply restore the Evernote database folders and files from a backup your PC backup software has created, you will temporarily have a restored database, until the Evernote web server overwrites everything during the next sync putting you right back to where you were before the restore.
I am hoping I missed something and there really is a way to actually restore an Evernote database properly to it's original condition, including the original organization of individual notebooks and stacked notebooks, without spending an enormous amount of time manually restoring the original organization of the notes. Please correct any misunderstandings in what I wrote above and offer any alternative methods that result in a true restoration of the Evernote database.
Thanks!
