GrumpyMonkey

Yes. That's why I bought the iPad with a lot of memory and that's why I pay for Evernote Premium (to store everything I need in there). It's for my life's work, and if I am going to be storing this mission-critical stuff somewhere else, there's no point in using Evernote. They promised a service for "storing everything" (yes, I am aware that phrasing has become increasingly difficult to find on their website) and I am buying into that promise. You can do it Evernote

hi. there is an evernote employee in that thread acknowledging that it's being read. a new feature (pin lock) was added to free accounts a few days before the restrictions and price increases. a few days before that, salesforce features were added for premium and business folks. new stuff gets added all of the time. it isn't always what we want for our particular workflows, and (especially the last couple months) it isn't always communicated well, but all of this is happening. linux support from evernote (as opposed to a third-party integration), for example, seems unlikely to ever happen. i'd recommend considering upgrading, though, if it is useful for you.

Whoops. My mistake. I knew that, too, because I just uploaded about 8GB into my account and had to break up a bunch of files over 200MB into two, three, or four pieces. Still too small, I'm afraid. I'd prefer 500MB or so.

The note size limit has long been an annoying issue for me, though the current 100MB is considerably better than the old 25MB limit! I've got a lot of PDFs, a lot of audio files, and other things I want to keep in one place. I have no interest at all in storing my stuff in GDrive. I'm glad they have the tie-up, but it's not for me, especially when I work offline so much, and need to search the content of my notes (GDrive only indexes the first 100 pages of a PDF, even one that is OCR'd). I encourage Evernote to constantly push to raise their limits, including this one.

it's probably not "most requested." i guess nested notebooks, raising the notebook limit, or functioning bullets in the editor would be more popular requests. the vote counts are a poor reflection of user interest, in my opinion. selective sync has been a problem since evernote's earliest days, so it is, at the very least, a long-requested feature.

I've got no illusion of unlimited space. I pay other companies to use their servers (1TB a month on my service is about $12 a month). I'd be happy to pay Evernote for theirs. But, I thought that was what the $8 a month premium was for -- keeping stuff in there indefinitely has been the value proposition all along. Selective sync has also long been part of it, though mainly on mobile, and in an alternative form for Evernote business (Business library that is so very close to functioning like selective sync, but there is no searching available). But, let's say for the sake of argument that they have avoided doing this because making space for large accounts is cost prohibitive (I don't think it is, but let's go with it). I could see paying $12 a month for that. $30 might be a bit on the high end, and I doubt I will ever pay $30 a month for any single app, no matter how nice it is. IF that is the reason for the resistance from Evernote, then all they have to do is come out and say it. Then, you know where things stand.

i don't understand what i said that ought to discourage evernote from implementing this, what i said that was sneaky, or where i said i was using this as a storage service. to reiterate, the former ceo recognized the need for this and evernote was working on it -- there is nothing nefarious or strange going on here. maybe i was unclear. here is a use case from last week's blog that is actually quite close to what i do. https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2016/06/24/8-ways-evernote-helps-genealogy/ basically, instead of my family's genealogy, i am looking as a historian at the genealogies of families in sixteenth century japan from a certain area of the country. evernote really is an excellent service for this. just as evernote recommends, i want to scan stuff and put it into evernote. however, due to the math i mentioned earlier, that is simply not feasible, and so i cannot effectively do my research (unless i use clumsy workarounds, as mentioned above). does this make sense? another use case is for teaching and admistration at the university, which is similar to this blog post. going paperless really takes advantage of amazing tools in evernote, but that is where the data quickly builds up. https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2015/02/25/create-paperless-office-evernote/ evernote offers a premium plan with 10gb of uploads per month, so even with apple's most expensive device (the mac pro), you will max out your drive in just a few months. it's untenable in its current form and i simply cannot get the amount that i would pay for each month, so evernote has effectively offered a plan that would be perfect for me, but hobbled the service to make sure i can't actually use it. all i am asking the company to do is to extend the functionality they have on mobile to the desktop. it's cool if they don't. that's their choice. perhaps there is premium level money in shopping lists and other use cases that require less server space or bandwidth than my use case -- people are willing to pay $8 a month for what, though? anyhow, their competitors long ago solved this problem for a fraction of the cost, so as much as i enjoy using evernote, and as much as i want them to succeed (as mentioned above, it does offer an amazing service), i can go elsewhere. it's a shame, and i don't understand it, but i can accept it. i just want to be clear what impact their decision has on real world use cases.

IT'S MATH The answer is math. If Evernote actually allowed me to take full advantage of the upload amount we pay for as premium users (at one point, it was even unlimited, but let's stick with the current 10GB per month limit), over time, given the 100,000 note limit and the individual note limit size, the theoretical storage limit for an account is roughly 9TB. Does anyone have a 9TB local drive? No. http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=169 But, Mac Math is the most painful math of all. 10GB of uploads per month x 12 months of service = 120GB of storage for Evernote, not including the necessary (and unnecessary) bloat that comes with an account. I wouldn't even make it a few months through a premium subscription. Apple devices typically come with 128 or 256GB standard, and it can be prohibitively expensive to increase local storage beyond that (the "Apple Tax"), not to mention a bit ridiculous to pay hundreds of dollars every few years (when you upgrade your computer) for extra space that you need for your Evernote notes. About 6 years ago, I maxed out the available storage on my computer (that was back when the monthly upload was maxed out at 1GB, which people at the time said was a huge amount, LOL), and I haven't been able to use Evernote to store "everything" (or even "lots of things") since 2013. This doesn't even touch on some of Evernote's other scalability issues. http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=127 So much for a one-hundred year company. Maybe, if you just want one-hundred years of shopping lists USE CASE It's pretty easy to max out your drive if you take going paperless to its logical conclusion, and you happen to work with a lot of paper. In my case, I regularly scanning hundreds of documents a week into PDF form, because lots and lots of paper comes my way. So, this is going to continue being a problem for the rest of my career. And, for businesses, I imagine the problem is much larger. IT'S AN OLD PROBLEM EVERNOTE HAS ALREADY ACKNOWLEDGED Evernote's former CEO recognized this as soon as the app launched and said selective sync would be necessary. One of the former development heads said they were working on it, and recognized how important it was. It's not as if this is some isolated case restricted to a few users who want to store their video libraries here or something. This is a longstanding issue baked into the product. The connection with mobile in this context is usually the comparison of features -- selective sync is a technology that does not need to be invented, because it is already in use on mobile. Evernote simply has to extend its use to the desktop. WORKAROUNDS Besides the "textification" workaround mentioned in the first link, other workarounds include using mobile (which would be very, very difficult to upload much data into, but I suppose that could theoretically be done by loading stuff into other apps and "opening" the files in Evernote) or spending a lot of time clicking around on the web client (it only just came out of beta). Both of these experiences (especially the web client) severely restrict your ability to use the app (see comments on these forums for details) and offer you no local "backup" of your files if you happen to have less than blazing fast (and unlimited) Internet connections. Yikes. I'd be a bit nervous entrusting 9TB of my most important data to a third party without backups. Nevermind the obvious problems encountered when trying to do anything with those attachments you've uploaded. I don't think this is a viable plan for Evernote going forward. Neither the Web client nor the mobile clients are meant to handle such use cases. COMPETITORS Are there other apps out there that can easily handle this problem? Yes! This isn't some obscure issue. Evernote's competitors long ago dealt with the issue of scalability in a paperless world. I regularly, and easily manage hundreds of GB of data with one other app at a fraction of Evernote's cost (the one I am primarily using is now cheaper to buy outright and use for several years than it would cost for a single year subscription to Evernote -- a sobering thought). So, why bother with Evernote? Well, it still has some great features unique to the service, which might be a discussion for another thread (in my mind, something like the wonderful user experience offered by Apple stuff, even though each device / application doesn't necessarily have the best specs in the industry). The effortless sync is the best part of it for me, though. When it works (it seems to be getting especially good these days), I can easily move among devices and do amazing things that no other app can manage, especially on the iPad. The potential is just amazing. With selective sync (and encrypted notebooks -- another longtime feature request), I think Evernote could differentiate itself from the competition and justify its pricing structure, especially for businesses and "power" users. At the moment, my usage of Evernote is so restricted, it actually isn't worth the price of a cup of coffee every month. Sorry Evernoters. This isn't a complaint about having to pay money for something I use or anything like that. I happily paid for the app in the past, and would have no qualms about paying for it now, but cannot justify it to myself right now, because I am exceedingly unlikely to buy into a subscription model that promises me hundreds of gigabytes of uploads and virtually unlimited storage on the servers (this is what I pay for, right?), but only if I never install the app on my computer, or only use it on my iPad (making it almost impossible to actually use what I pay for). It just doesn't make sense. I'd like to hear from Evernote someday why they still have not introduced this. While Evernote continues to muck around with the pricing without implementing this feature, Evernote's competitors already offer alternatives that easily handle hundreds of gigabytes of data (with advanced AI features, optical character recognition for PDFs, total encryption, and a host of other features as well). If we were still back in 2008, Evernote could afford to dawdle, but I think they are years behind on some of these things (especially selective sync and encryption), and they really need to rethink their priorities. Honestly, at this point, considering where the CEO comes from, and the recent integration with Google, the best explanation for still trying to go forward without coding in the selective sync is to chuck it all and fold Evernote into Google (I have come to suspect that might be the plan, because it might finally explain the long delay in implementing selective sync, but I hope I am completely wrong about this) -- a new old service with selective sync using Google Drive (wonderful for people without any qualms about privacy or giving up the data to be mined).

this isn't a survey. ten people clicked a button. as for the reason for that button, i've explained why i think voting is there, and i've explained why i think it is terrible, both in concept and (heaven forbid) in practice. you seem to think they are a bunch of code monkeys, so i am not sure why they'd bother looking at the votes, and you said management ought to be looking at other data, so it seems to me that you don't think the votes are meaningful either.

have you read the job descriptions for these jobs? please do. they aren't code monkeys slaving away under their ceo overlord. they are engineers, designers, and developers who are expected to do something creative and innovative. they didn't raise the prices at evernote to pay code monkeys. engineers got hired to build something great, and i want them to do that -- if they can't be bothered to read the forums to learn what some of their most passionate users think, or if they would prefer to see what a handful of button clickers think rather than consider some of the amazing ideas folks have had here (many of which get little attention, but would really be great for the app, in my opinion), then they are going about it all wrong in my opinion. at any rate, if they are basing any decisions on these votes (should the button clicks of 10 people influence the user experience of 200 million?), even if just as a factor in some decisions, then clearly (in my opinion) they are unlikely to build anything great. frankly, i don't know what the voting is for, except to mollify folks who feel powerless (as suggested by my analogies above). users used to clamour for the voting option years ago. i didn't like the idea then, i was glad we didn't have it, and i like the idea even less now. at least, i hope it is nothing more than a meaningless button. you can all vote if what i want them to do is use their brains. i want them to put more thought into this than any of us have, and i want them to make a great app that i can use, recommend to my students and colleagues, and would be happy to pay for every year (the current price would make it many times more than i spend on anything else, but there are plenty of feature requests out there that would make it a no-brainer for me). regarding this idea, we have fleshed this out for 8 years now, we had the former ceo saying it was needed, and we had one of the former top developers saying that they were working on it. it solves an obvious problem. a child could figure out the math on this one -- 10gb a month for 12 months and my drive is full. i cannot use the app anymore. if they need votes to figure out the problem here, then there isn't much hope for the app -- i actually think they are pretty sharp folks who haven't solved this problm yet for reasons we don't know, which makes our voting even more meaningless, because we are clicking the buttons without a full understanding. a conversation / dialogue with us about this stuff would be nice.

yes. i am aware that they are encouraging votes. as i said above, i don't think evernote's business decisions should be influenced with a few button clicks from a handful of folks (.0000001%?) among the more than 200 million members. evernote employees ought to read the forums, use their own judgment to pick out the best ideas (votes or not), and improve the product in the way that they think is best. in other words, if voting matters on the forums, i don't think it should. if voting doesn't really matter, then don't pretend it does by having it (see my elevator button analogy above). this might mean that one of my longtime suggestions (selective sync) doesn't get prioritized for another eight years. i can live with that, if they are reading, deliberating, and coming to such a conclusion in the best interest of the app. it's hard to believe we have gone this long without selective sync, and i don't know the reason (even the former ceo and former developers wanted it), but i doubt it's from a lack of votes. if they want a real "democracy" (not this button clicking faux democratic process), then vote us into positions within the company (customer reps?) and give us official power to influence development. that would be "real" representative democracy.

Frankly, I don't think votes matter, and I don't even think the votes should -- Evernote developers need to get together, discuss it, and make a decision that is best for the app, regardless of how many votes there are (after all, you'll never get any significant number out of 200 million anyhow). We don't have inside knowledge, after all. It's just a button like the red one on the elevator or the request for a Kindle book on Amazon. It might make us feel better to have it, but I don't think it is really meaningful. But, first, Evernote developers should read the forums and figure it out for themselves. It won't take them long to see how much of a "priority" it ought to be. We've got a former CEO saying it is needed, former developers saying they are working on it, and years of posts by longtime users saying why they need it. The question is: why haven't they done it? I am guessing there are reasons, and they are good ones, even if I (and others) don't agree with it. Still, I hope they will reconsider (regardless of how many votes there are / aren't).

Yep. I completely agree. We could pay 70 USD a year to get 10GB-a-month uploads, but in Mac drives that only have 128 or 256GB, we are only talking about a year or so worth of uploads! Why Mobile has it and the Mac doesn't has always been a mystery to me. It is something they said at the beginning that they would need, years ago they said they were working on it, but in 2016 we still don't have it. I hope Evernote takes this more seriously. I know they are working hard on the app, and I appreciate it, but they really need to consider the long term if they want folks to stick around (and keep paying). This is what I have done in the past, though I admit that it is not my favorite solution, and I eventually got kind of annoyed with having to do it for everything. http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=127 But, it is a possibility.

Yojimbo is pretty cool. And, I am a huge fan of BareBones -- longtime user of BBEdit. However, I think DEVONthink is going to be the superior solution if you are looking for encryption on both OSX and iOS, because Yojimbo on iOS (last I checked) is read-only, so it is of limited value. It's nothing to sneeze at -- syncing effortlessly and securely on your home network instead of the cloud is a big deal. But, DEVONthink already does that, plus a lot more. I like both apps for different reasons, and I am glad they are both around -- hopefully Evernote will join the growing ranks of apps (many of their competitors) that support encryption. VoodooPad's last update, if I recall correctly, was a fix to broken encryption. It may have involved a herculean effort on the back end, but the consumer experience remains unchanged, iOS remains stuck years in the past, and the Dropbox syncing is rather fickle -- last I used it I lost data. I don't think a maintenance update every year or two really counts as active support (take a look at the forums for a sense of how much talking is going on about it). I think it is abandonware, I am afraid, but I hope Plausible Labs proves me wrong. Still, it does kind of work, especially if you are just on OSX, and it still does a lot of stuff better than anyone else. I will note that DEVONthink has similar (better, in my opinion) linking capabilities. DEVONthink To Go (the iOS version) is amazing, and it is great to see it nearing release to the general public. I think Evernote has a pretty strong lock on a huge swath of this market, and I doubt they are quaking in their Birkenstocks, but it would be very, very difficult to say that they are the industry leader anymore, certainly not in terms of security. I really think they dropped the ball (many years ago) on this, but it is still there, waiting to be picked up again if they are willing to make a real commitement to securing customer data.

True. Evernote can still be useful (it is for me), but there are other convenient tools out there that have encryption, so it isn't a matter of never going anywhere or never doing anything -- you simply use something besides Evernote. In the case of Apple Notes, it just takes a touch of your fingerr to encrypt. I would say this is the worst outcome for Evernote, and I am sorry to see it, but it was a choice they made. The good news is that Evernote has many, many more features than a lot of its competitors, and it does a lot of things better. If only they had encryption, I think it would all really come together into a perfect package.

I don't know if it is the number one thing, because people generally seem apathetic about security, with an attitude that security is impossible, so why bother? It's unfortunate, because even if encryption is not 100% security (nothing is), it is pretty effective. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/why_we_encrypt.html Evernote knows more than we do about encryption, and even had a private meeting with Snowden in 2015 to talk about it, but to no avail. Snowden has a pretty authoratative voice when it comes to encryption. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/why_we_encrypt.html I am not terribly optimistic about the possibilty of changing things at Evernote, because years of requesting it have not had any effect. But, if lots of people put pressure on Evernote, perhaps it will adopt better encryption. It fits their company philosophy (three data laws), it fits the product (put everything in it), and it certainly fits the trend among companies dealing with cloud security. Speaking for myself, I use other apps for data I wouldn't be comfortable printing out and distributing at a party (Would you really want to share everything you clipped from the web? Is that anyone else's business?), so relatively little goes into my Evernote account anymore. I still recommend it to students and even did a class the other day on how to incorporate it into their studies, but with the warning that they be very careful about putting anything personal into it (actually, notes can be very personal as well, so they got a warning about that too).

Welcome to Evernote! It is a great service, in many regards, but security is not one of them, I am afraid. Without encryption, it has now fallen behind Apple Notes (one touch encryption), OneNote (notebook sections), VoodooPad (abandonware that still has better encryption), DEVONthink (encryption / secure wifi sync), and Dropbox (encrypted data at rest, but they have the key, so only for decorative purposes, but at least it is something). I used to say that Evernote had security comparable to that offered by other cloud products, but that cannot be said anymore. Everynote has a lot going for it in terms of security, with two-factor encryption and its own servers, but this last step of giving the user complete control over the security of their data has not yet been taken. Perhaps 2016 will be the year? It'd be nice to see.

I think the label of "guru" (or whatever) is a nice one, because it is an indication to other users that you have probably been around a while, so you know something, and maybe your advice or suggestions are worth reading. A lot of forums try to provide indications like this to help folks wade through the postings. We're not employees, but we are also not trolls or noobs. Obviously, first-time posters often have posts far superior to old-timers, and they should be read as well, but it's tough for software to pick those out (I recommend old-timers link to any they find intersting in order to help people discover them). Anyhow, I wouldn't read too much into the labels, but just use them as guides. The Evernote editor remains problematic (I don't remember bullets ever working properly on iOS, and that includes a note I made this morning), but I don't think it is worth kmaking 300+ complaints about it One or two would be a sufficient contribution to the pile of complaints. It's one of those things everyone knows about if they have been around a while: they kind of accept it as it is and stay or reject it and move on to another app. Over time, I've found it more productive to try and help other folks get the most out of the app (working around the chronic and acute issues) rather than spending time looking at the state of the toilet paper (using the metaphor above). To whit: my advice would be to find a balance between (1) using features unique to "Evernote" and (2) hewing as close as possible to "plain text" (with markdown, separate "attachments" in their own notes, and use note links / information-rich titles as needed to tie it together). Your notes will be unaffected over the years (with some exceptions -- mysterious spaces used to occasionally crop up in my notes, and iOS still makes a mess of note conflicts, etc.). Yes, I am aware that there ar also tags, notebooks, and other things. Use those as you wish -- please find whatever balance works best for your workflow. The editor may get fixed someday, and I wish the developers luck with the thankless task their (skilled and dedicated) predecessors were unable to complete (is a solution possible?), but until that happens, the strategy I suggest might be worth considering.

Ransomware is an interesting phenomenon, but not one that I think is likely to affect people who take measures to backup their data, because most of us are not running massive data centers with multiple servers and a huge number of "things" connected to them (like a hospital or government office). http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=962 As stated before, Evernote keeps backups for you in the form of note histories, it has backups off site in case the main server is compromised, it has dedicated security engineers, and you have complete control over all of the data on your own hard drive (Time Machine is pretty amazing, as JM mentioned). There are multiple redundancies in Evernote -- it isn't perfect, but it is pretty nice. And, you can add some yourself (see the link above). As for the kind of data you keep in Evernote, I would strongly recommend against placing unencrypted, sensitive data into it or any other cloud service. I am hoping that Evernote will provide us with encrypted notebooks someday together with selective sync (no, I am not interested in voting for it or anything else -- if the engineers are interested in my opinion, they can take the time to read some of my 10,000+ posts on Evernote stuff and years of conversations on these topics, including discussion of them by the former CEO and their predecessors). http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=1605 But, Evernote is fantastic for non-sensitive stuff, and I think ransomware is probably the least of anyone's worries. Again, a fascinating topic (I happen to be pretty interested in cyber security), but not one to which Evernote is particularly vulnerable. As for sticking their heads in the sand, I imagine the CEO and most of the employees there are far more aware of threats and countermeasures than most of us are, and their livelihood depends on getting this stuff right, so I think we can afford to give some credence to their statements on security. Again, the service is certainly not perfect, and I think we could do with some improvements (such as an easier way to handle recovery of individual notes or databases on our own), but it is doing pretty well. [EDIT:] If you are still unconvinced that this is a manageable risk, then install Evernote, introduce an "air gap" into your system, and never connect to the Internet again. You'll probably be pretty safe this way, though you'll lose most of the benefits of Evernote. Other apps that are not cloud based could be more effective in such a model, but it is still possible with Evernote.

D. GDrive only indexes the first 100 pages of PDFs (last I checked). If you have long PDFs (me), it is a poor choice. OneNote on the Mac is still under-developed, in my opinion. Neither one has offline support on mobile (as far as I know) without manually clicking each and every file you need (with tens of thousands, this is really not a pleasant prospect). Neither one of them is encrypted (encrypting each and every file you want to keep secure is not realistic for some workflows). And, in the end, they are just data lockers. They don't have a whole lot of support for creative tasks. I think they are both wonderful options, and I recommend folks look into them, but they are unencrypted data lockers, and not really "alternatives" to Evernote, which is something else -- more of a personal information manager. From my perspective, the overall best alternative to Evernote is generally OneNote, though it isn't the solution I have chosen.

Personally, I am not interested in the least in simply password protected notes or notebooks. If Evernote implements password protection, that's fine, but it doesn't really do anything for me. It is, as others have mentioned, largely (not completely) a separate issue from encryption. What I want to see is encryption for notes and notebooks. Other apps have mastered this, so it isn't an impossible technical feat beyond the skills of Evernote developers. You can search in them just fine, so that is a red herring. Some even require a password every time you open the app -- a solution that would seem to address both problems (password protection and encryption). The problem, as far as I can tell, is a lack of will. Evernote hasn't prioritized this (or passwords on notes), so it hasn't happened. If Evernote is still meant to be our external brain, I think that implies a lot of very personal / sensitive information will be stored in it, so I think we'd all benefit from encryption. Requiring a password (touch id on iOS) to open the app and encrypting the contents would be a wonderful solution, in my opinion.

By the way, this argument isn't theoretical or a matter of semantics. Today Evernote published the second part of a blog post about how to use Evernote for your taxes. It sounds really convenient and I'd love to do it, but without encryption, I don't think it is such a good idea. Why not? Well, the blog post concludes by saying: "If you have any remaining tax-related paper, ask your accountant or tax preparer if you can keep scanned copies of it instead—if you can, scan it to Evernote and shred the paper." Sounds like good advice, except that it demonstrates to me that Evernote sees its service as a safe place to keep your data unencrypted. You shred it at home (which is under lock and key among hundreds of millions of other homes with piles and piles of worthless paper), as if someone is likely to break into your house, rifle through your stuff, and steal your tax papers. But, you leave it online, where it could potentially be accessed by anyone anonymously and with near total impunity. That sounds like a terrible idea. You might say that could never happen. But, it has happened already with Dropbox. https://www.grahamcluley.com/2014/05/dropbox-box-leak/ Some users might say that Evernote is not Dropbox, so it is OK. I don't have a good answer for that except to say that Evernote has been hacked in the past, and if something can happen to one cloud provider, it can happen to others, so why not give users the tools to protect themselves, just in case? Other users might say that my claim above sounds impossible, because Dropbox is encrypted, and it actually undermines my point about encryption, because didn't I just finish a long post about how much we need it? Yes, Dropbox encrypts the data, but they hold the key. What I am looking for is zero knowledge encryption -- no employee could read it. No one except for you. Tech savvy users might say that is all fine and good, but the Dropbox problem was connected with sharing. OK. True. But, with a secure service (like SpiderOak), your shared stuff can be password protected, and when you share the link, it comes with a password for the other party. In other words, the link is insufficient to get the document, and the user would be protected, even from a mistake like the one Dropbox made. Long story short, I think Evernote needs to change its position on encryption and that will only come about when they recognize the unnecessary risks they are exposing their users to, especially when they advocate storing sensitive data in the service. I know the developers know much more than I do about encryption, and I am certain they are capable of implementing it -- some of them even have security backgrounds, and they take the physical security of the data centers very seriously. What I don't know is why they continue to resist prioritizing it. That has been a mystery for nearly a decade now.

If "hacking" means letting my family members use my computer, then I guess I have been "hacked" a lot. I am not terribly worried about my wife seeing our banking statements, after all, but I guess different families do stuff differently. I don't see any numbers yet, so I am going to disregard your claim about how much more "likely" you are to get hacked at home than in the cloud. "Millions" is a number, right? And, I gave you specific hacking events, at least one of which affected you. 1) About 50 million Evernote users had their passwords reset. The data accessed? Unknown. 2) My medical records. That would be the number 1. But, if we look at other hacks, 100 million were hacked just last year http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/12/23/cyberattack-surge-100m-medical-records-hacked-in-2015-officials-say.html. 3) My credit card information. That would be the number 1. But, if we look at other hacks, Target lost about 40 million credit card numbers the other day. 4) Dropbox. I think they had about 20 million users back in 2011. 5) My Ashley Madison account. That would be the number 1. No. Just kidding. There were over 30 million for that hack. 6) The US government lost about 20 million personnel files. What are we up to now? About 260 million people's data on third-party servers were hacked. And, these are just a few random examples. Are you honestly going to argue that more people at home (about the entire population of the US) are getting their information hacked, even by your definition of "hacking"? I find that doubtful. Why does it matter? Well, if you think we are more likely to get hacked at home, that suggests Evernote's cloud is safer, and there really isn't much incentive for us to push them for more security, or for them to offer it. However, if the reality is the opposite, and it is glaringly obvious that unencrypted data on the cloud puts hundreds of millions of us at risk every day, I'd say that is great incentive for Evernote to step up and distinguish themselves from other services by offering the most secure and reliable cloud environment available for your second brain. That beats work chat any day, in my opinion.

I don't know about 100%, but I think we are talking about your being more secure off the cloud than on it. I haven't heard this before about home computers being easier to break into (I've got an encrypted drive and long, random password), or that someone you know is more likely to hack your computer (I suppose it depends on the kind of people you know). Do you have numbers for this claim? Speaking from personal experience, people have tried (and often succeeded) in hacking "my" data on the cloud several times (is it "my" data when it is on someone else's servers and their terms of service clearly state that they aren't responsible if the data is hacked?) : (1) Evernote was hacked, (2) my medical records have apparently been stolen at least once (from a former university), (3) my credit card information has been leaked on numerous occasions through hacks (the latest one was last week, in fact), (4) and at one point Dropbox exposed every single user to hacking when it messed up an update and opened up all of the accounts. I wonder how the millions of customers at Ashley Madison would respond to your claim that family members are more likely to hack personal data? I wonder how the millions of people who had their personnel files leaked by the government would feel about that claim? I just don't think there are millions and millions of family members breaking into their loved ones' computers. And, they also aren't throwing that stuff online for everyone to see. The numbers don't seem to back up your claim. There is some pretty horrendous stuff going on out there, after all. More importantly, to your last point, I don't know which one is "inherently" more or less secure -- the cloud or your home computer. In most cases, I suspect the cloud, if managed properly, has the potential to be much "more" secure, because we are talking about tight physical control over the data and the possibility of extremely well-trained security experts watching over it. One company I think is doing a great job of this is SpiderOak -- you have zero knowledge encryption, everything is built around the principle of protecting your security / privacy, and it seems like it would be pretty difficult to actually gain access to data, even if an employee somehow managed to rent a U-Haul, make off with all of the servers, because everything is encrypted. It's not 100% secure, but it is pretty close to it. We agree on the conclusion, even if we don't on the steps you took to get there -- we ought to be expecting people who hold our data on their servers to at least offer us the option of zero-knowledge encryption.

There's an interesting distinction being made between data located on the physical device and data in the cloud. It's the exact same stuff in many cases, but it is treated completely differently. Both Apple and Evernote want to do everything possible to protect the security of the physical device. However, when it comes to the cloud, neither one wants to offer encryption. We don't think twice about locking the doors of our houses, which arguably contain much less "valuable" stuff than the cloud, but we can't get that kind of security for the cloud. People keep their sensitive financial documents in safes or locked filing cabinets, but we are encouraged to put that stuff into the cloud (Evernote had a blog post on that yesterday), where anyone in the world could (potentially) gain access. I wonder why that is. This attitude is pervasive among software developers -- it isn't just Evernote or Apple who have made this artificial distinction between data on the phone and on the servers. Undeniably, the most egregious incidents of unauthorized access have been to data on the cloud -- sometimes millions of people at a time are put at risk by a single hack. Frankly speaking, the phone is not the weak point in the security equation. I like what I hear Apple saying about encryption and I like to hear Apple and Evernote's commitments to giving customers control over their data security, but until encryption becomes the default setting for everything on the cloud, we are all more exposed to risk than we should be. The technology is out there, ready and waiting to be included in the application.