Ask HN: If Evernote goes out of business, what happens to all our notes? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If Evernote goes out of business, what happens to all our notes?

20 pointsalexgpark24 comments

If they go out due to bankruptcy/liquidation, the b'y trustee can "avoid" what(ever few) privacy and IP ownership protections that my exist in the Evernote EULA and sell all of your data AND identity to data brokers... after all what's more important than making the creditors whole?!?

I've been thinking about this lately. It would be difficult, but I think legislation against this scenario should be an immediate concern.

It's like Snapchat; the whole premise of security disappears when the user realizes they can take a screenshot.

A company can go bankrupt and sell off all user data, in raw form or otherwise, regardless of the agreement under which they collected it.

Huh.

Is that really the case? Would liquidation take priority over contracts (EULAs in this case) -- I wonder what happened when St. Vincent's Hospital went bankrupt...were all the medical records sold off to the highest bidder(I dont remember hearing about that?)

Is anyone aware of any good open alternatives to Evernote? I've been reluctant to try Evernote for that particular reason (and lock-in factors). Ideally something like: 1) open source format; 2) you host the files e.g. on Dropbox; 3) markdown; 4) searchable (and entries can be tagged). Happy to pay for the app but the files need to be self-hosted in an open format.

Just curious but is there already a standard open source file format for notes, notebooks and documents?

This was discussed on HN previously, with no GREAT alternatives, but a few workable alternatives[1]

I'm actively looking for a replacement. I have tried Paperwork[2], Laverna[3], and DevonThink[4]

If you're on OSX, and open to a fair amount of upfront work, DevonThink is the best alternative I've used, and can sync with webDAV against Owncloud-or-other-DAV-server for multi-client-access.

That said, I've not yet found anything that approaches the overall feature set of Evernote across OSX+iOS, and continue to use it daily. I wish they would just let us host our notebooks on our own datastores.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9206002

[2] http://paperwork.rocks

[3] https://laverna.cc

[4] http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/overvie...

+1 for DEVONthink. Your description is fitting, too.

Nothing says you can't just keep a directory full of notes as text/etc files. But some other options might be:

Keepnote (Linux/Windows/Mac but awful. I love it on Linux/Windows) http://keepnote.org/

Quiver (Mac) http://happenapps.com/#quiver

Yojimbo (Mac/iOS) http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/

NVAlt (Mac) http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

OneNote for Windows (not open format, but can export into open format. Avoid saving notebooks to OneDrive, save them to local disk storage. OneNote for other platforms does not support local storage at all)

ResophNotes (Windows) Aims to be an NVAlt clone. I don't like it, but many others do. http://www.resoph.com/ResophNotes/Welcome.html

You've described a git repository containing folders of markdown files. The "app" would be a git client and a markdown editor, both of which are available on all mobile platforms.

I use pocket git and IA writer on Android. It's a great combo!

Whatever evernote decides.

I guess before that happens, we should have all migrated to another tool - Microsoft OneNote being the closest competitor, having this tool at hand may make sense: http://www.howtogeek.com/227719/how-to-convert-from-evernote...

FFS Microsoft, let me pin my notebooks on the lefthand side of onenote for mac. The navigation when you have lots and lots of sections is horrendous. ESPECIALLY when you can't sort by name from the mac client. Regardless, scrolling left to right isn't natural with a keyboard and mouse when you've got literally hundreds of sections like I do (one per client).

as a side note, I'd be curious to see what you store and how you organize it and use it for.

I found this while I was looking for info on Evernote just now; they were Inc magazine's company of the year in 2011.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201112/evernote-2011-company-of-...

Similar to NvAtl and Devonthink for the Mac is Eaglefiler http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/

I'm working on a real-time collaborative note taking app with math typesetting. (www.escherpad.com)

Do you think porting data over is something that people might be interested in paying for on a subscription plan?

not to sound rude but I don't think people who are concerned about their notes would move their precious notes to another not-yet-proven startup.

I agree. So I will just focus on building the core app then!

I loved Evernote. With Libin leaving, it seemed like writing on the wall. I migrated everything to Google Drive while I plan my migration to DEVONthink.

if you're seriously concerned about this, then the answer is to backup your notes periodically. There are a number of ways to do this - the one I use involves installing Evernote locally and then periodically exporting the database into Dropbox. Of course, this doesn't guarantee that your notes won't fall into the wrong hands. To avoid that you'd need to either encrypt your notes or run something yourself.

There is probably a diff history, so if the notes get out, encrypting only protects you on new notes going forward.

What usually happens in cases like these is that you get to download all of your notes in some format. This is what happened when google wave was taken down.

Google shuttering a product is a bit of a different thing than a company going out of business. It's a different pool of people in a different position dealing with different issues. I'd like to think they would do the same (right) thing, but I think that's a risky bet.

The Evernote desktop app got some quite nice export functions.

It can, among others make a quite nice linked HTML tree.

I guess, google keep and onenote is the closest competitors.

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