(Archived) How Secure is the Uploaded Content?

[TheGurkha 1]

I'm looking at ways to be as paperless at home as possible. I'm considering things like scanning and adding to Evernote my bank statements, utility bills and so forth and then shredding them. I know I can store them locally in a non-synchronised Notebook, but really I'd want the Notebook to be synchronised so that the notes get OCR'd and then I can search them. But I must admit I am a little wary (to put it mildly) about putting sensitive personal documents on the remote storage.

Hence my question: how secure is the remote storage?

[engberg 89]

There's some more information about the topic here:

http://blog.evernote.com/2008/04/15/eve ... -security/

viewtopic.php?f=30&t=9583&p=37567#p46892

viewtopic.php?f=30&t=9583&p=37567#p46912

[TheGurkha 1]

Cool, thanks, I'll review it.

[audri 0]

I read the associated thread and have 3 questions (I upgraded to Premium for the security features):

1. I have put my sensitive info into 2 local notebooks. However, since the synchronized and local notebooks are combined in the Mac library (in Applications Support / Evernote), there is no way to back these up separately on my Drobo or to separately encrypt them carefully and then store somewhere. Is this possible?

2. Is there any way for our notebooks to be stored individually -- by notebook -- in the Mac library?

3. Can the scanned docs be stored somewhere other than the Mac Library? I want to put in many thousands of pages, and that simply won't work on my internal hard drive.

My comments come after reading these two comments.

I think that what you’re really looking for is just a hard drive backup service for a local application on your computer. You could do this with Evernote if you choose: put all of your notes in “Local” notebooks on your computer and then subscribe to something like Iron Mountain’s secure backup service to store an encrypted copy of your database file.

Dave has hinted that we can use local notebooks, and indeed, I’ve experimented with that. However, it appears at this moment that it’s an “all-or-nothing” solution: In order to manually sync or backup the local notebooks, I have to essentially bypass the synchronization built in to Evernote and manually copy the .exb file everywhere I want it. One of the only things I have a slight issue with, architecturally, is that while Evernote allows me to choose to have notebooks that are synchronized or not, it keeps them all IN THE SAME FILE.

If we implemented this concept in Evernote (even just separating the “Synchronized notebooks” from the “Local notebooks” into two distinct files), then we could easily have a service where we could choose between Encrypted/Local and Un-Encrypted/Synchronized and be able to have the best of both worlds. In fact, this could be an ideal “premium” feature: The Encrypted notebooks could be replicated (in their entirety) via the service for an additional fee, which I think most of us would gladly pay.

[audri 0]

One other thing: my husband is very technical, so he can implement symbolic links, etc.

[engberg 89]

On your own local computer, all of your notes (and embedded attachments) are stored within a single database, which is necessary for efficient searching and sorting on operations that cross notebook boundaries. For example, searching with "all notebooks" selected.

So you'd probably want to just manage the entire Evernote data directory (~/Library/Application Support/Evernote) securely. For example, some people have quit Evernote, moved this to an encrypted file system, and then replaced the old location with a symbolic link to the new location. This is a bit of a power-user task, and doesn't play nicely with some things like Time Machine, but it definitely works.