Old and New Evernote Logos

I’ve been with Evernote a long time. Since well before the days that they even offered cloud sync. I want to say something like 2006 or 2007? I used to carry Evernote portable on a USB thumbdrive.

Then in 2008 they added sync, and I paid for that with alacrity. The ability to have a fully synced installation of Evernote on EVERY computer I used? Worth every penny!

In August of 2009, I was appointed the Assistant Dean in the College of Education where I work. Evernote saved my bacon at least once a week for the entire seven years that I was working there. We even had an amazingly successful accreditation visit. My portfolio of responsibilities beyond accreditation was pretty extensive, and Evernote helped me there too.

I realized pretty soon after I left the Dean’s Office that I had learned some effective practices for using Evernote’s features (I got especially good at using the ENML and regex to find pertinent notes quickly). I also learned some really bad habits. Primary among them was a kind of Ron Popeil approach to getting things into Evernote (set it and forget it; emails and autoforwards and reckless abandon with the Evernote Clipper browser plugin). And that approach allowed me to use my chosen strategy (search for the needles in the haystack; diamonds in the rough, etc.), but resulted in a database with around 20k notes in it.

Now, our story is in 2016. That is about when some things at Evernote started to decline. Whereas episodes of the Evernote podcast used to describe Evernote and its culture as a “100 year startup,” business factors (which I do not claim to understand) started to erode. The CEO left, and some really bad years followed. Performance of the app suffered. The Web-based implementation, that was supposed to save everything, was not great, yet became the focus of the enterprise’s continued viability. The user experience became really unsatisfying, yada yada, and here we are in 2023.

I’ve been told by some folks I trust that I am too loyal to things that do not serve my needs. And that is probably accurate.

The last straw, figuratively, was the most recent price hike for subscription. Early on, I believe I was $50 per year for sync on all devices, with very generous upload limits (that I never approached). Now, even with educator discount, I was looking at $100 plus per year for a similar (VERY notably not better) experience.

There are other tools, and I have found one that suits me and Evernote’s stated policy is that my data is mine. They are accurate to the letter, but the spirit of their “portability” is really poor. I have the option to export an XML file that is difficult for humans to parse, or multiple HTML pages.

Let’s return to the bad habits. I had something like 20k notes, and I needed to get them out (for various reasons). I was content to pay one more year of subscription and get the hell out, slamming the door behind me. Luckily, I found a utility called YARLE (Yet Another Rope Ladder from Evernote) which can take the .ENEX files and spit out markdown (pure text) versions of the notes, with a _resource folder in each resultant ENEX conversion folder. in that resource folder is assembled the images and other attachments that were associated with each note.

I know that Evernote was a very useful tool at a certain point in my life. But I have different needs and goals now, and I need a different tool to meet those needs and goals. Now that I have found one (2+ years of great compatibility), and I have processed and exported all by ~500 notes, I can wave goodbye to Evernote.

Take it easy, buddy. I learned some lessons and anti-lessons from you, and those are very valuable things to say.

I’ll probably be entirely decamped by end of summer 2023, and possibly have all the useful and archivable notes extracted and archived by the end of the year. Wish me luck!

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