Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
blog.evernote.com
blog.evernote.com
Support acknowledged it was a bug and told me that there was nothing they could do. They didn't even offer to let me have a few months free to catch back up and re-create my notebooks.
It also sounds like an implied admission, on the part of evernote, of not having working backups ? I would think that they would have found some way any way to get your data back to you given what just happened.
For that matter, isn't the (or one) reason for having a backup so that errant deletes don't obliterate everything?
In the long term everything suffers from "data decay". It's just too hard to keep old files around forever.
E.g. there were comments I made on Usenet many years ago. Google has previously attempted to preserve those, but they seem to be fading away into the ether. That's okay by me.
Fortunately there is no strict time limit on completing this process so a design that looks like "and after X months it will have aged out of our backups" appears to be considered reasonable. You are still responsible for making sure your backups are safely destroyed.
They also took like two weeks to respond to my problem ticket. I'd submitted it on New Year's Eve, so I anticipated having to wait a day or two, but that was pretty ridiculous.
I think a middle ground would be a two step deletion, no?
Step1 : Delete from everyone's machine but keep a backup for X days to allow people to file complaints etc.
Step2 : Delete Backup
It lets you export in ENEX format, which is fully re-importable back to Evernote, or as HTML web pages.
Really annoying if you're importing in to another account.
So glad to see that I wasn't the only one. OneNote got the list formatting right in its original version (2003!), yet Evernote has steadfastly refused to do anything about how bad their own implementation is.
I've had too many problems with evernote in the past. Random formatting and data lost. Support always being hopeless. I threw in the towel.
It is a good example of why it's so important to keep your own incremental backups though. I wouldn't be comfortable relying on EN as much as I do if I didn't sync and back up my entire note store. (Similarly, although I trust Google's reliability far more, I still keep and back up a local sync of my email.)
most of the point of paying for evernote is they should remove the worry about losing anything. Their entire point for being is to record your notes. And keep them safe and accessible. If there's a statistically noticeable chance that they will lose some or all of your data, they have no substantive value.
Then Evernote decided to delete several dozen of my notes from their server, and helpfully synced that change to all my devices.
I'm currently looking for a replacement that suits my needs. Microsoft OneNote looks promising, now that it has Mac/Android support.
They did try to placate with 3 months free (after being a paying customer for years), but I'm just amazed that with the ~$300M of VC they've raised, they still haven't caught up to the real-time sync of Google Docs of 8+ years ago.
Hopefully their new focus (i.e. sync) is aiming to at least match that. I'd have moved by now if I could find something that was both highly cross-platform (Mac/Win/iOS) and lighter (Markdown pretty please).
I've compromised on OneNote, which isn't lightweight, but has become impressively cross-platform.
https://www.petekeen.net/git-backed-personal-markdown-wiki (I added Deft later)
Part of the Evernote value proposition is being able to find things again (although Evernote's search interface is abysmally bad, and offers no way to narrow your search so as not have a huge number of irrelevant matches).
It was created by Automattic, Matt Mullenweg's company.
I have a problem committing to a program/site that says:
it’s all completely free
I wonder why they don't even mention Simperium on their home page? It's not even mentioned under Help. It's a secret?
They even have a a perfect opportunity to mention it. E.g. in Simplenote Help they say:
Q: How does syncing work?
A: All notes are synced between your device
...
they automatically and wirelessly show up
in the other locations
No, they hypothetize that the average user wants a high level description, not to read about servers, incremental sync protocols, etc.
The secret sauce underlying this syncing is
Simperium, a service for developers to move
data everywhere it's needed, instantly and
automatically
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/simperium
[2] http://simplenote.com/2013/01/24/simplenote-supercharged/
They also offer easy exports of your notes.
If you've never tried, give it a shot - http://simplenote.com
For notes or docs that need diagram etc I use Google Docs. Even my team uses the same (as part of the Google Apps suite).
What I love about Simplenote is that it does what it says - just plain text notes. No gimmicks, no extra load and bells and whistles.
But I have a feeling that they will shut it down soon. They had a paid tier and they removed it some time back. There has hardly been any update I guess and iirc they don't really update their Android app frequently either.
Do they encrypt the notes at client side before sending it their servers? I would love to use a self hosted app that has such a functional and minimal interface and clean sync feature.
I've been using it ever since. It stores data in plain text files (dokuwiki markup) and in addition the folder structure is mirrored in the note hierarchy. Zim is open, cross-platform, can include Latex-formula, and is extendable with plugins written in Python. I really also like that it is a proper desktop application instead of some webapp that changes UX every now and then, usually to worse, and that is dependent on network connection. After learning the keyboard shortcuts it is really a pleasure to use. Five stars * * * * *
I keep my Zim notebooks (separate NB's for Work and Personal things) in Dropbox for easy syncing between two desktops. Other Win7 and other Ubuntu.
edit: Added mention to Latex, as it might be of interest in this crowd.
I didn't "switch" as much as I've started (inspired by Luhmann's Zettelkasten) a personal wiki of sorts in markdown files. I've been using 1Writer for iPad (as a separate app from Editorial and iaWriter, where I usually compose text), which already lists the files in a folder on the left-hand side of the screen.
I also have a script on a Linux server that watches for changes in that folder and auto-commits to a local git repo under increasing "version numbers".
I don't understand. EverNote has instant sync across devices. If you are using in web browser or PC client then its even real time. (Android one requires you to click "Done" before syncing apparently because it treats the whole note as one giant text area).
I very frequently switch between typing on my desktop or my tablet whenever i leave my desk but have an idea running in my head. Similarly if someone is viewing my note, they get frequent updates as I type
I'm aware of instant-sync in the web client, but typically (especially in this case) prefer desktop clients to web.
In the unfortunate case I referenced above, I spent an entire morning writing in Evernote (Mac desktop). At lunch I had another thought to add, opened Evernote on my phone, and apparently the same note was already open - so it overwrote all the work I set all day to it's earlier state. There was no way to get it back, as it didn't consider it a conflict and it had no backups due to being less than 8 hours (I went through this with their support team). It's a broken product.
Sync shouldn't even need to be one of their goals - it should be a solved problem by now.
it's free too: http://www.moo.do
As for me, I'm now a lifer anti-customer of Evernote.
If all your data exists in a file hierachy that you can browse, edit manually, and back up, then you have the safety of relying only on foundational systems for the survival of your data, and the power to use your data as you please with tools of your choosing. But if the application owns your data—if it stores it behind the scenes and never exposes it to you directly—then your data is exactly as fragile as that application. If there’s a bug, your data can disappear. If the company goes under, your application can rot to unusability. If the product is discontinued, the same. If the company kills a feature, you have to do without it. Or, most likely of all, the company could start publishing buggier and buggier updates, and you’ll have no choice but to use buggier and buggier software.
It seems like a clear choice to me: if the data is anything I value, I must have direct access to it, regardless of what tools I use to manipulate it. The only data I let websites or applications own is data I’d be OK with losing.
And perhaps the analogy is still useful. I'm ok with that situation because I understand and accept the logic of indexing. If the fund I owned changed their prospectus and decided to start active management, or significantly increased their management fee, or whatever, I could pull my money out and invest it elsewhere. Similarly in software there are definite advantages to having a dedicated steward for a given type of data, but it's much better if there is some way to take your data back should you decide to put it elsewhere.
With Evernote, it is possible to export all your notes in a variety of formats, including XML, which can then be imported into other note taking applications if you wish. So to me, the bare fact that the application controls the data isn't necessarily an issue. What was becoming an issue was the fact that they didn't appear to treat it with sufficient respect. I hope we'll see that start to change now.
There have been advances in systems that reclaim or duplicate ownership of third-party data back toward the user, personal API/quantified being the most recent. I think the missing link is not the technology, but rather a social movement that promotes the value of data access and ownership. This might be one silver lining to recent data breach and hacking scandals.
@nsrivast: a movement is exactly what we need. EFF is great, but they have a lot of things on their plate, and are not always consumer friendly. I've been working on core ideas for a Users First movement, because the web, contrary to the ideal results of a free-market, has been putting users last. Much of that has to do with users being the product not the customer. Your ability to "organize & visualize information for efficient teaching & understanding" would be invaluable!
@twhb: you have no email address on your account. please contact me if you are interested in helping articulate such a movement.
Evernote seems to instead have lumped identity and authorization together. And had only one set of authorization permissions: all of your stuff. So when the permissions change, they all change.
This approach is nothing more than laziness. It's not just "not thinking ahead", it's completely ignoring 40 years of practice in the field.
Not really. It's not like MS Word reading your .doc find can't corrupt it leaving you hanging if you don't have a backup. Catastrophic data loss isn't cured by the "data accessed by an application" model.
> an application failure won't prevent you to 1. keep your data (because backups)
My point is that you don't inherently get backups just by having control of the data file. It requires extra action on your part. If you don't backup, an application failure can easily destroy your only copy.
I do agree with your other points, although there are significant limitations to using the filesystem for storage in an application like Evernote. Perhaps a good compromise would be to use a publicly available database engine like postgres (although I'm sure they derive advantages from their proprietary format beyond the mere fact that it's proprietary).
"I've deleted my diagram, can you restore it for me?"
"No. We don't store your data, we never even see it"
"What a useless service, just get my data back or I want to speak to random escalation person"
99% of users don't care about privacy, architecture, etc. They want it to just work (TM). They want us to be able to undo their deletion, find their data when they forget where they moved it.
So it's users pressuring suppliers in the wrong direction, it's not all one way traffic.
So may be managing data by product supplier is NOT the wrong direction?
We can do both. Google stores, backs up, secures, and generally ensures your data is safe, and you can click a button to download it all if you think you can do any of that better.
This is probably too hard to ask every company to do the same, as it would exclude smaller companies who don't have the resources (this takes a lot of time and development!). So it makes sense for them to offer a different feature set, and accept that it's not going to be suitable for some people.
Google Drive 53%
Dropbox 4%
OneDrive 1%
I don't think you're having a problem selling the idea :).
It doesn't really secure users' data, since Google is able to read that data. Were it truly secure, it would all be encrypted with a high-entropy keys known only to the users.
People without backups could always choose to store their keys with Google, but people who want their data to actually be secure would be free not to.
What's hard about "Backup to google drive / dropbox / icloud"?
I've seen single-developer applications do this. If a company of 10 people can't do this, they need to question the competence / diligence of their team.
This is exactly the right solution, and credit to Google for providing it.
> This is probably too hard to ask every company to do the same, as it would exclude smaller companies who don't have the resources (this takes a lot of time and development!).
I'm surprised you say that; it doesn't seem to me that 'dump this user's dataset to JSON/XML/whatever' should be very hard to do. Admittedly I've never worked on anything at Google scale. What am I missing?
To pick a few things I can talk about - sufficient replication to not lose data, data security that actually works (small companies can't - and shouldn't - afford disk shredders and internal access audits), targeted obliteration of customer data on request (including getting it out of the backups without rendering the backups worthless), and making sure that your exported data dump which contains massive amounts of personal information is only ever released to the correct user.
Doing any one of these things in isolation is not all that hard, because you can trade off against the others (for example, it is dead easy to do a data dump if you don't care about data security). Doing all of them at the same time is a large, expensive development project that would sink any startup.
This is the sad Catch 22 we live in where privacy is jeopardized at the cost of ease of use
Do you think there is any value in educating the customer further? Periodically (5mins) reminding the user with a small notification to save (and backup) their work? I agree it can become a UX Nightmare (e.g. MS Paperclipguy), but having a checkbox "do not remind me again" could possibly go a long way as well.
I have been an Evernote Premium user for a long time, and since the company seems to be having a rough time, I recently looked at getting all of my data out of Evernote. What a nightmare.
I loved Evernote. I loved the fact that Phil Libin said he wanted it to be a 100-year company. I don't know all the details, but the fact that he seems to have given up... what a letdown. I'm working on getting my data out. Once I'm done, I think I'm going to let my subscription lapse.
1. Evernote has dual-language OCR of PDFs and images (and a few others crappy formats that normally shouldn't be used like .docx, .xlsx, etc). That's a great idea. DevonThink doesn't even have Japanese support (their licensed OCR only supports Western languages).
2. Uh... OK god dammit that is really the only feature that keeps me using Evernote's horrid apps. Shit.
Why do you consider it a "nightmare" to get your data out of Evernote? You can select one, several, or all of the notes in a notebook and export them in either HTML or XML format, with all metadata (tags, etc.) and embedded media included. That seems pretty good to me, and it's certainly easy. If you wanted something more sophisticated, Evernote on the Mac has exceptionally complete support for AppleScript, so you can code up whatever kind of fancy extraction you need.
I'm not asking to be argumentative; I've always considered Evernote's support for extracting data to be pretty darn good, and clearly superior to many competitive apps/services, so I'm curious to know what additional functionality you would require before you'd say it's not a "nightmare" to extract your information.
My point doesn't apply so must just the plain text. It's everything. You put it in in source format, and you get .enex out. It's not so cut and dry.
Going in, it's one step. Coming out, to get it back in the same format you got it... it's multiple steps, and manipulation with other tools.
He didn't understand a word.
No, you don't sound cynical at all. I think It's perfectly reasonable to think that and it seems to be shaking out that way. It does seem pretty douchey to pontificate about your views on applications and data access in the form of a "this is why I don't use applications of this type" and then launch into an example of exactly what happened to someone who just said "I lost all my data with this service." It's kind of like "no shit. Thanks for telling me after the fact, professor."
Close, its a principle fundamental to modern cloud-based companies.
Offer the cloud storage for free, for 0 privacy and the permission to read, copy, access, and sell your data to third parties
> Offer my butt storage for free, for 0 privacy and the permission to read, copy, access, and sell your data to third parties
Moreover, data loss is not a possibility, it's pretty much a certainty, because it's backed straight in the business model. At some point investors need to get their money back, and what better way to do that than have the company acquired? It's such an effective way that a lot of people starting their companies do that hoping that they'll get bought by a big corp. That the product gets subsequently shut down doesn't seem to bother anyone (except the customers, who at this point really should know better than to do business with a startup unless they're prepared for the moment said startup shows them the middle finger and disappears).
GD feels just like a filesystem to me. At that time. Now I actually use GD for this.
I work at Evernote and would like to look at your support ticket with our management team to figure out what happened. Will you please let me know your ticket number?
Thanks in advance. Please know that we're here to help.
Well, like many others, I've been wishing Evernote would drop all the auxiliary stuff and focus on their core product. Hopefully that's exactly what will now happen. Evernote has become an absolutely critical part of my life. Even though I use it for business (along with everything else) though, I have no use for the majority of the new features they've added over the past few years. Of course, not every feature will be useful to everyone, and just because I don't use something doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. However, when you see significant bugs languish for years while niche features get priority, it suggests a problem. I really hope this signifies a change in direction (as opposed to a milestone in the current, downward, one).
Genuinely curious. I've noted that they seem to have multiple apps in the AppStore doing similar things.
Yes, 1000 times yes! I so wish I could author in Evernote using markdown. Getting any sort of rich text done in a note is extremely cumbersome in Evernote, lists for instance.
I've had the strong suspicion for a long time now that they simply aren't listening to these sorts of feature requests that don't tie into their enterprise/business focus – at least since about 2013.
We do not support markdown but have created an API that lets third party developers provide markdown support.
One really good example is www.marxi.co
Likewise, I use Evernote Scannable every so often without connecting to Evernote because it's a really good scanner app. Exports and emails images without any fuss.
I'd be perfectly happy if both apps were spun [back] off into their own entities too. Evernote as a note taking company doesn't do anything for me, but they do have other nice products.
I don't care one whit about chat.
https://www.evernote.com/market/feature/socks-en_CA?sku=SOCK...
Too much VC money sloshing around.
I know that there's a lot of groupthink in the VC community, and so CEOs aren't always selected strictly on merit. But even I, with no executive experience whatsoever, would know not to OK something like that.
As Saint Steven once put it:
I'm actually as proud of the things
we haven't done as the things I have done.
Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
CEO: thanks for the hundreds of millions of
dollars you've invested in us. Here's something
new we've done. We're putting your money
to good use.
WE HAVE SOCKS FOR SALE!!!
non-spineless Board of Directors:
That's great.
Let's all just go back to your office and help you
clean out your desk. Then we'll escort you out of
the building and the rest of us will reconvene to
discuss finding a better steward for the hundreds
of millions of dollars we've given you.
IMO startups that aren't making money and that keep having to do rounds of financing need to, most of all, FOCUS. Evernote board should be chanting: FOCUS! FOCUS! FOCUS!
The margins are already so thick that they probably only had to sell a few to break even.
But it looks like they found out themselves, eventually... ;)
I love Google Keep as is.
You mean like this?
(And it doesn't actually travel to space unless you're on a satellite connection.)
I wrote a little more about DTP here: http://jakeseliger.com/2010/11/12/scrivener-or-devonthink-pr... , though I understand that some people use Evernote differently than DTP.
Except for a native linux client :(
Syncing. This is a default piece of all browsers, the 2 main operating systems win/os x, and comes standard on most phones. This is like the browser, you can have it for free so you stay in our ecosystem. Mega GIVES you 50GB of storage completely free NOW, and it is likely more secure. I don't know enterprise as well as I know consumer, but at some point I would imagine the choice is between buying a few SSDs and having an internal server, or setting up your own secure system via VPN. There can't be much room for this.
Maybe they are gearing up for a google merger or something. They are doing their mailbox app which looks cool and integrates storage and syncing. However, once again
1. Why would I use a mail client that only interfaces with gmail and outlook?
2. What is the point of the sync, this is default by most mail providers and clients?
3. Why would I want mail storage? I actually don't know what my mailbox limit is, but I certainly would not want to have the amount of .txt documents that could fill that up. Also, this is basic functionality. You can't pull me on your platform, google has the users you want and are better positioned, I still don't understand how you make money as a company.
Big fan of OneNote.
It seems like a fairly good product, although I really only use it for bookmarking tabs that Chrome seems to lose when it crashes/updates itself and nukes the "recently closed tabs" list.
Edit: Vs. Office Standard. I have no insight into Home or Education versions.
Architecturally it's a very impressive product and makes some pretty creative uses of the windows folder hierarchy to get it's job done.
I think OneNote was built with a crashfirst mentality - It is very hard to lose data w/ it. Their QA team is damn impressive too, I've been a follower of theirs for a while.
My only complaint is the lack of true real-time sharing ala google docs's Operational Transform (they didn't exist when it was made), but it does come close. Opening a shared notebook in class and having everyone collaborate on the note was an awesome experience.
It's inking support blows everything out of the water IMHO. It also has a lot of the advanced automation features you can access by integrating OneTastic.
Only real issue I've ran into is that it gets to be a pain to print with as it has some wonky scaling features and the page layout feels like an after thought.
It is also hard to get groups of people to use it effectively because it is basically a WIKI and needs to have the same kind of discipline / habits to make it usable.
If they can do inking support with Operational Transforms, they may be able to have a replay feature without even trying - something that many teachers seem to really want out of the product.
My friend and I love the product so much we've been trying to make our own online version with inking support w/ paper.js share.js, github, and localstorage.
However, although it's amazing compared to a pen and paper it's still incredibly frustrating to work with.
* It can't handle large amounts of handwriting without igniting relatively powerful computers
* It crashes constantly when trying to balance pen input with palm rejection
* Syncing doesn't really work with non-trivial merging and doesn't handle sync errors nor errors in general well -- all of these usually end up with handwriting layered on top of itself
* Syncing is basically out of your control, you can't do partial syncs when you really need a section/page fast, and large notebooks with handwriting can take hours to sync completely. I've basically resigned to splitting my notes into many smaller notebooks.
* Handwriting on the "Desktop" version is a complete joke and so you're constantly switching between the that and the app to get good handwriting and more features.
So it's great, until it doesn't work then it's a nightmare.
Managing notebooks, tabs and pages is a real pain. I end up with a sprawling OneNote notebook that gets lost in the sprawl of OneDrive/SharePoint.
(I haven't tried that many things, but really I don't know of any decent competitor that runs well on multiple platforms, and does the basic things I need - which is text notes, other file types, and ability to tag and put into a notebook. And on a native app).
I refuse to stop paying for any service that doesn't believe in open sharing through widely accepted/popular formats. The internet is alive today only because people believe in sharing information, not holding it back behind such a walled garden.
I refuse to support such companies. Not in 2015 atleast.
[1]This is the notebook in question and mind you, it's a "Shared" notebook: https://www.evernote.com/pub/contentblueprint/thecontentmark...
Ever since I left Evernote, I created a private Wordpress blog and used their sharing bookmark to store notes, snippets and everything else.
I also use Google docs and Apple Notes app for other kinds of data and it has served me well. I understand this wouldn't fit everyone's bill, but it definitely fit mine.
So, adios Evernote! Hope someone replaces you soon!
I'm not sure you meant that
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10218915
(Note: The BusinessInsider article was a re-publication of the original on syrah.co.)
My vote is for Fab, which went from $1B to effectively $0.
While GroupOn went public, and continues to this day, just as Zynga did.
As usual, the Motley Fool's analysis is excellent: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/04/07/bull-vs-bea...
I have no financial position either way, and I'm not claiming everything is rosy for GRPN but it's very far from being a "dead unicorn" and at least by my analysis the stock is pretty undervalued at the moment.
They are similar in that they haven't made anything note worthy in a while and their main product is really just a feature of bigger companies apps and services.
2k+ engineers on staff without notable improvements to the core user-facing product in a while.
Declining signups, declining engagement.
Nobody stepping into the permanent CEO role.
I don't see how this ends well.
But they're burning through $130M+ a quarter and growth is stalling. They don't seem to have leadership with a vision of where to take the company from here.
Twitter still enjoys some cache with celebrities, but how much longer will that hold true?
So how will they stop bleeding? Maybe they'll transform Twitter into something profitable, or maybe they'll look to the 2,000+ engineers, and ask why they need so many.
The curiosity is what becomes of the 2,000 engineers on staff. What is the break down in terms of their roles within the company, i.e. back-end, development, user-experience. When does the twitter back-end become a mature platform and you can start to wean down the number of engineers.
As an aside, I would love an app or system that will trace the origin of a story within the web eco-system. One comment from Re/Code is recounted / repackaged across the entire system.
Also, I was trying to find the original Periscope iterative development post through Google and Bing, no luck thanks to the two sites now integrating news into their search results.
1. http://recode.net/2015/09/29/twitter-plans-to-go-beyond-its-...
I think Dropbox Teams is too expensive but I'm paying it anyway because I think it's that much better. (I think that's a sign they set the prices exactly right)
Nowadays dropbox needs to convince user of other services that it is better. On paper though, dropbox provides less for more money - that's going to be difficult. I share your opinion - they are better. The reason I know is because I have been a client for years and they never let me down even in weird syncing scenario. Syncing quality is #1 feature of a cloud storage, you need to be able to trust it fully.
However, how do I convince a MS user that 1 TB from dropbox for 7.99 GBP/month is a better deal than 1 TB (actually 5 TB since it is 1 TB per user) + Office 365 + 60 Skype Minutes for 7.99 GBP/month ?
OneDrive for Business is a great example of screwed up sync. Whomever made the call to release that steaming pile should be flogged. Rumor has it they are finally fixing the broken sync client.
When the MS product guys were pretending that our network/workstation image was the reason that OneDrive sync broke, I took a laptop out of the box, put Windows 8 on it, streamed down Office ProPlus and signed in a dummy user with a small file tree. Then we wrote a script that created a text file and saved it to a directory every 3 hours. Than we left it. The client broke itself after 2-3 days with no user activity.
With Dropbox, I had a laptop in my basement that I forgot about for 3 years. I turned it on, signed into Dropbox, and it magically just worked. So sync issues. No conflicts.
It's already too late. They've shown they can't be trusted to sync files. It's ridiculous to me to even consider trusting them with my files. Dropbox actually has had a problem in the past but it was a bug they fixed immediately. They care about this so much.
If they rely on Dropbox getting syncing right to not lose "important files, photos of loved ones, ideas and important documents" then they are doing it wrong.
They should backup anyway, and only then trust Dropbox for plain syncing. Dropbox is not backup.
Actually it's because I'm considering it that I advocate this.
>How do you know you lost files?
You look for them and they can't be found. And keeping a tally and/or checksum per folder in your backup doesn't hurt either.
>Meanwhile if there's a synching problem and files get eaten by my file synching service Time Machine will happily assume those files were removed by me. One year later when I go to find some picture of my daughter I took and the file is gone you tell me what backup I go to to restore that file.
In your case it's simple, you can just go to Time Machine, as it archives all versions of the files, changed and/or deleted or not.
>You have 1 year's worth of hourly backups? I don't.
Actually with Time Machine you sort of have.
But, more essentially, you don't need "1 year's worth of hourly backups?", unless you're doing something very important and create new such files multiple times per day (e.g. if you're a business and store customer data, or a new site and you have your news database).
For stuff like "archived projects", "family pictures" or "music collection" just take incremental backups of them, and set your backup program to never delete any files during sync, but just put them in a "deleted" folder.
For stuff that changes fast, like working documents, emails and such, take backups with Time Machine (which happen in "real time"). Every few months take a full backup.
Besides network backup, never backup in just one external disk (and test your backup disks from time to time), and don't keep them in one place.
That is, if that stuff is very important to you. Some people can lose most of it, as it's mainly them hoarding digital BS.
If you're a business, OTOH, backup is PART of what you should do anyway.
I'm so reliant on this that I'm hacking together an automatic-commit scheme with git and a Linux server that syncs some important folders.
Because now Google, Microsoft and Amazon offer it at a cheaper price and better integrated with their own products.
The broader answer here is "Dropbox took a bunch of VC money, so 'just doing well enough' isn't an option for them and they have to stop at nothing to grow faster"
For me, the key part of Dropbox isn't first-party support, it's that a bajillion third-party apps have cross-platform support for it where availability of other services is rather more piecemeal.
Notes-taking apps have the competition of <div contenteditable="true"/>. There isn't much left to do for a notes-taking app: Everything else is bells and whistles.
Responsibilities should be called here. Dropbox, Evernote, Slack and GitHub are all 4 hosting a massive free service, highly replaceable with cheap alternatives, with low switching costs. I sincerely hope the VCs who invest in those companies have another plan than "Add more features forever".
Open Source projects existed a long time before GitHub, and will exist a long time after the cool kids abandoned it for whatever reason.
But the private repos and the on-site offering - the things people pay for? Fair bit of competition there.
And in a half-assed way syncing.
There was another article recently that said that files are old news and people are using Slack. Granted they are shipping files in that, but people have probably moved on to web hosted versions of documents anyway.
Switched to Dropbox and haven't had a single sync issue since.
You're right that it's a service that is ridiculously simple in what it does, but right now, I can't imagine moving my 10GB+ of data to another platform.
I'm not saying you're wrong I just haven't seen what you might be referring to hence why I asked.
I had thought that Drive was confusing, because I would "create" a Doc or a Spreadsheet in the root directory and then go back to look for it and not be able to find it. I created a Spreadsheet, and named it something starting with 'T'. This put it on the 3rd or 4th pagination request to get more files (these requests were ~1-2 seconds slow) in my root directory. But also the line height of all the files in the directory filled up so much vertical space that it felt like I was seeing most of the directory on page 1, even though it had much more content.
When I look at ~/ locally in Finder, Nautilus, etc. the line height is tight and there is no pagination. I can see everything I have access to instantly or within an immediate scroll. When I use Google Drive every file line item takes up a lot of vertical space and I have to page through results. The result is that I can't see everything and I feel as though things are missing, even though they aren't.
Its material design. It's just bad.
While installing Dropbox it just syncs the difference and done.
[1]There is a workaround but you need to think about it before reinstalling the OS (saving some user data or something).
Any Dropbox killer will let you port over your Dropbox folder to its servers.
(No idea how difficult it would be to introduce this into their system, but conceptually it's a pretty easily surmounted problem.)
Case in point: I'm a big fan of Excel and Word, it's a solid piece of software. But I haven't used it in over a year, all my stuff sits with Google Docs/Sheets. Excel won't disappear (extremely popular in finance with VBA) but for most users there's no difference and little switching costs.
Google and Amazon keep screwing with things because they have a complicated global-dominance ecosystem that they're trying to build. I don't trust them with my files. But Dropbox keeps doing what they're doing with only modest, incremental improvements (that gradually add up). As long as they keep things solid, I'll keep using and recommending them.
I'm an edge case, and the case (Linux support) doesn't bode well for DropBox.
50% are < 1000 words long texts written by me, transcribed from an audio/video/paper source or saved/clipped/copypasted from elsewhere
20% complete webpages or complete articles deemed important enough to save a copy for later 10% graphics, annotated images and PDFs 10% oneliners and quotes 10% todo-lists, task lists, shopping lists, etc.
Every new piece of information I have been exposed to and deemed important enough to return to later has gone into my Evernote inbox, from where it would be weekly sorted into an appropriate notebook by subject, life area, etc. Most important ones are tagged for regular review. Everything else gets some regular dedicated random browsing time, and is often discovered in research when preparing presentations, writing or thinking about any particular topic. There are 80+ notebooks in 10 sections.
Organizing this corpus efficiently and engaging with it with an appropriate interface would effectively be a multiplier for the ability to utilize knowledge and experience. Interacting with such data accumulated over decades through a combined voice assistant / mind map / dashboard / big screen (Microsoft Surface style) is a futuristic idea of knowledge work - the only question is whether there is a large enough consumer user base for such an infovore/generalist/researcher approach to information.
EDIT 1: PayPal and LinkedIn indicate that the migration app's developer is in China. [1] That initially gave me pause about using the app --- who knows where my information might end up? --- but then I'm guessing that Chinese hackers seeking to steal confidential information aren't likely to be so open about being in China, nor to charge $30 for the app. (Of course, that too could all be part of the evil hackers' cover story, right?)
EDIT 2: I just used the app to migrate 6,500-plus notes from Evernote to OneNote as a test. It seemed to work flawlessly. (My suggestion is to use Evernote's export facility on each EN notebook in turn to create a separate export file; then set up OneNote sections corresponding to each EN Notebook; then use the OneNote Bulk app to import each EN notebook's export file into the corresponding ON section.) I'm still pondering whether to make a permanent switch.
But I have yet to find another product that is better than Evernote and OneNote or even just a single, other product better than Evernote. if you find one let me know. I love my OneNote but the organization drives me nuts (I love the tagging abilities in Evernote).
Since this resides on your Synology, it's not stored in a cloud service. Depending on your viewpoint, this can be a pro or a con. It also doesn't have a native app, and I have no idea how it does with 8,000 notes.
I do know they're continuing to update it, and I truly hope they add features like Markdown support. I personally use Evernote still (and using Alternote for the actual note taking part), but could see myself switching if Evernote ends up losing my notes or something.
even had the audacity to keep charging me
Lack of Latex support, being able to export raw data easily, and long startup time which renders notes unaccessible are my three problems with Evernote. These problems don't exist with Quiver.
PS no relationship with either Quiver or Evernote
I've used it for a couple of years, it's excellent and insanely quick once you learn all the keys plus you can just dump the database to Dropbox and have easy syncing.
No mobile client so I use other stuff for that (Wunderlist is my favourite on Android) but for work stuff/projects it's spot on.
[0] https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2014/01/04/on-software-qualit...
Who on earth needs features like "work chat"?
This[1] article makes the point that they realized they needed business users to make money, and they were trying to appeal to them.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/evernote-the-first-dead-un...
They want to create a network effect to justify their valuation.
Otherwise it's just a competitor to OneNote, and why is that worth a billion dollars.
I don't really like it for free-form text since it is list-oriented, but it's taken a surprising chunk out of what I used to keep in nvALT and OmniFocus.
Seriously: I have three text editors in the lower four icons of my iPad (four if the ssh client counts): one to have the important work thing open (Editorial), another with my personal note folder (1Write) and yet another for just typing text quickly (iA Writer), jotting quick lists, etc. The "office girlfriend" will often grab my iPad during a meeting to tell me something in private or start writing down notes, and she knows she's only allowed to open the third one.
Startup-er folk: pay attention to "enhanced Markdown editors" like Editorial (good inline preview) and 1Write (decent to see an entire folder at once, much like the Evernote UI), not to mention the "todo.txt" category. Make comparable desktop clients (so I don't have to muck about in Sublime Text or Notepad++ trying to reproduce the folder view situation).
Sell the world the beauty of plain text, including budding formats like todo.txt and the kind of YAML+markdown that static blog generators use.
(When I was young and very abstract/naïve, I dreamed of starting a company to sell custom DSLs. But this is the next best thing: develop text-based DSLs for tagging, todo lists, meeting notes, etc -- readable-but-standardisable standards like Markdown. Make great UIs, make them multi platform.)
1. a similar interface across all platforms with similar features and behavior (android vs desktop text editing is a very different experience)
2. tagging/enhanced search
3. hyperlinks to other nodes and the Internet. This is incredibly powerful to me for nodes that are relevant in multiple contexts. You can put copy/paste the URL of any node into any other and viola, workflowy symlinks!
4. FOCUS. I have ~15k lines of notes in workfowy, but am still able to "zoom in" and focus on the content of just one note. That is super powerful for my productivity. A text editor with 16 spaces of indent and squished text to the right just does not do that for me. In fact, that will probably stress me out more.
We made this because Workflowy has a lot of things that we thought we could improve, and they're kinda slow in development, but that's another story.
As a paying customer it's been very frustrating to see "business" features like note sharing and chat consuming valuable resources while the reason I bought the product, managing notes and todo lists, becomes increasing unusable.
That's a very, very bold statement...
I'm sure it wasn't easy to fire them, but don't try and make the situation rosey. The folks who decided on the direction of the company decided wrong and now they have to fire the people who executed those decision.
Edit: Would you all prefer the word "Terminated"?
"Fired" implies wrong-doing on their part.
"Laid off" or "let them go" means the company couldn't afford to pay them, or didn't need them anymore. It leaves no black mark against their name.
When I get laid off there is no expectation that my job will come back.
Can't put my finger on when exactly, but during one of our recessions they stopped getting called back, and then companies started to realize once the local union was busted they could hire new workers at a fraction of the price, and...here you are.
When I was growing up, it felt like there was a clear distinction between "fired" (with cause) and "laid off" (bad revenues, can't afford you). But over time I increasingly saw people refer to all terminations as being "laid off".
Then "let go" entered the fray, and I heard of recruiters who told people to refer to any for-cause firing as "being let go".
Whatever term you use on this, people will abuse until it doesn't mean that anymore. They want to make it sound like any termination wasn't for-cause, while having plausible deniability if anyone calls them on it.
And yes, I know the usual ivory tower lecture about "that's how language normally works!" But normally it's slow enough that you can reasonably infer what someone means because of mutual knowledge of what the words mean. Not here. And probably, not ever.
What made it worse was the morning of the lay-off, one of them told me a joke: "What's the difference between a recession and a depression? A recession is when your neighbor loses his job, a depression is when you lose yours". You know why a good manager goes into his office and closes the door after executing the "terminations"? In my case, it was to hide the fact that I was crying.
So different, in fact, that I have been "laid off" when the employer really had a mind to fire me for poor performance but wanted to avoid hurting my future prospects.
Here, don't take my word for it:
The problem with these moves is that the top 20% often see the writing on the wall and leave shortly after. Then the second 20% start testing the waters. Then...
I used 5% of the overall features - all I want is to take notes and have them indexed. There was so much bloat and I couldn't make a proper bullet list, so I had no choice to switch. I never understood why people paid for this app.
https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/67060-list-functionali...
This is a problem with too much funding. You have to pay off the investors, which requires rapid growth, which often requires buying market share at a loss.
Two months ago I pretty much decided 'ok you know what. This is it' after waiting for 25 seconds to get a note back that then turned out to be mysteriously 'missing'.
It happens, right. I get it. And I got it back with some support. But the focus wasn't there, and the platform got old.
Wind the clock back a year and a half (maybe two?) and Evernote was unstoppable compared to the competition.
Now? It's stale. Slow. Predictable and uninspiring.
While reading letters of layoffs is almost always a depressing thing, I sincerely hope that the 'focus' which they speak of is real. That everything, and I mean everything, gets dropped except making the core product as amazing as it once was.
If they do that, I'll come back in a heartbeat. I'll come back with dollar bills.
I got faith Evernote. Come back to the light.
http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2015/08/16/1800#onenote-to-ru...
Edit: the Business Insider article (which maybe should be retained as the link?) has some of the information: 13% of workforce let go. Taiwan, Singapore, and Moscow offices closing. I couldn't tell if the 47 were from these offices mostly. I wouldn't think a note-taking app/website would need to be too dispersed around the world.
Let's hope Evernote stops messing around with useless features like "Work Chat" and start improving their clients instead. It's kinda silly that a third party can make a client vastly better and more pleasant to use than the official one.
I have exported from evernote and moved to nvAlt and gone back again...
It takes a little work to set it up to sync to mobile but it is doable with dropbox.
It does not have the same 'notebook' concept that evernote does, but that might not matter to you.
Could you please remove this bit of CSS. I'd like to be able to see my scrollbar:
body::-webkit-scrollbar {
width: 0!important;
}After years of using notepad, notepad++, sublime text, and now atom, I feel like the plaintext experience is severely lacking.
Select all the text in a note, mark as plain text, copy something from any site, paste, formatting is ignored. Paste with source formatting should be the exception, not the norm.
The lack of headers and other basic formatting options is also frustrating. Wordpress does a better job with it's editor... and it's a web app!
A few months ago, I noticed that there were suddenly lots of ads within Evernote, encouraging me to upgrade to the paid version. I'm not complaining, since they need to make money, but it did strike me as being more aggressive than before. Now I understand what was (is) happening.
I firmly believe that Evernote raised too much money, at far too high of a valuation, and they fucked themselves. They did not have the product and market to justify a $1B valuation. They just didn't. They bet huge on their ability to invent whole new markets that sound like they're related to evernote, but aren't, really. And unsurprisingly, that didn't pan out.
Now the core product has been stagnant for years; gaining "features" like work chat which were clearly dreamt up in a silo, completely disconnected from the market's needs. And now the troops will pay for management's complete and total fucking incompetence. And yes, I know one CEO is gone, but the new CEO is an absolute fucking joke as well.
And long-time customers like me... we keep hoping that OneNote or some similar product will add an "Import from Evernote" button. So that we can escape this mismanaged, formerly great product.
Incidentally, speaking of recent changes - one thing I have noticed over the past few months are constant reminders and emails to "Upgrade to Premium". I wonder if this was the immediate focus of the new CEO: to convert free customers to paying. After all, an important point was stressed in the CEO's letter - that their paying subscriber count has increased by 40% YOY.
Compare and contrast this with, say, craigslist, which still only has a few dozen employees. There's nothing wrong with keeping a product tightly scoped and keeping a business highly efficient and consistently profitable year after year, decade after decade. Maybe you don't get to ride the unicorn train, but maybe instead you get to work on something that you own (or own a big part of) and can enjoy your job consistently.
A blessing in disguise is that this made me find an alternative which was trusty Atlassian Bitbucket, along with their free private repos each can be accompanied with a markdown tolerant wiki, sure it's not quite the same but as a developer notepad bitbucket wiki has worked out quite well.
The latest news just locks me further into migrating all remaining bits from evernote, then again if the 47 employees let go were responsible for web client new material UI (there is no support linux client) and the remaining employees rollback and want to do as little innovation as they did between 2008-2014 then perhaps I'll reconsider
It seems like a smart move to focus on the features that are most useful to their core users instead of trying to be everything to everybody.
https://twitter.com/evernote_dev/status/650089211844890624 https://twitter.com/evernotehelps/status/650086523719671808
The other note-capture tool that I've used religiously is "The Brain"[0], it's great for bookmarking and visualizing relationships (I even use it as my address book for contacts), it handles notes, links to files and URLs and can be synced with Dropbox or via their own cloud service.
On the other hand for simple note taking evernote really sucks, it's too cluttered and it's editor is subpar.
A few years ago I was an avid springpad user before they shut down, but they suffered from the same issues: too bloated, not really good editor. But it worked beter for me than evernote.
To me it feels like evernote tries to solve 2 separate problems: taking simple and small notes, archiving and indexing important documents. Unfortunately it fails at both for me :(
But there's a cost. I don't like having years of information stuck in an app that makes it very difficult to extract.
My guess is if the new corporate direction is to monetize/nickel&dime, I'll take on the lift to moving. I can get 90% of the functionality that I need in the native OS X filesystem with spotlight comments and little helper apps, and I have a work Mac now.
Why do you say it's difficult to extract? You can select one, several, or all of the notes in a notebook and export them in either HTML or XML format, with all metadata (tags, etc.) and embedded media included. That seems pretty good to me, and it's certainly easy. If you wanted something more sophisticated, Evernote on the Mac has exceptionally complete support for AppleScript, so you can code up whatever kind of fancy extraction you need.
I'm not asking to be argumentative; I've always considered Evernote's support for extracting data to be pretty darn good, and clearly superior to many competitive apps/services, so I'm curious to know what additional functionality you would require before you'd say it's not "very difficult" to extract your information.
Another major complain is that it's really difficult to store code in a note.
I started using [WizNote](http://www.wiznote.com/) recently and it seems really good: markdown, free, multiple directory support, comments, etc
Btw does anyone remember this article? https://www.fastcompany.com/3012870/dialed/evernotes-quest-t... Have they changed their mind yet?
> Today we let go of 47 people from the Evernote team and announced the closure of three of our global offices. We are grateful for the immense contributions of each and every affected person.
So, new CEO gets appointed and starts torching the place. I suppose that will help the bottom line short term. But I'd really like to see the number of resignations in the next days.
https://transpose.com is an interesting start, but needs a big cash injection to make it better - and suffers from data lock-in again.
Evernote Food was already shut down (https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2015/09/16/better-brainstorms...) a couple weeks ago.
At some point I installed Google Keep, which is lightweight, easy to use, and syncs, without feeling like I just installed an entire suite simply to jot down some quick notes.
I write a lot of articles and I have to constantly rearrange sections to achieve a better flow. It's getting annoying to constantly copy and paste chunks of text to move them around.
I was under impression that Evernote will evolve into something like RealTime+Word+Powerpoint - but no :(
I think Evernote is done. They lost their mojo and there is no way to get it back :(
Once you're hooked, you just keep using it, like extended memory.
* Rubbish font handling and formatting
* Superfluous functionality when it doesn't get the important things right
* The new beta interface doesn't give you a nice general overview of your notes. I preferred the old interface.
Last I checked that was near impossible despite it being a largely solved problem in every other text input service out there (Slack, forums, StackExchange, etc.).
Maybe note taking apps just have no money in them?
If something else did that I would swap in a heart beat and for my other notes I'd convert them to google docs.
Mind that "an office" can be only one or two persons doing some local marketing work or do some specific feature implementation.
No idea what it does, that annoyed me too much to ever find out.
Makes me wonder how many SV unicorns will flop next year. My prediction is Twitter and Hoosuite.