How to Jump Ship from Evernote and Take Your Data with You | Hacker News Reader

How to Jump Ship from Evernote and Take Your Data with You

lifehacker.com

104 pointsmnmlsm38 comments

Reminder: most cloud services can do this with your data. They just don't explicitly say so.

A big reason to move for some people (that is not mentioned in the article, but is detailed in another Lifehacker post), is that they have updated their EULA such that end-user data is now accessible to Evernote employees "for machine learning reasons", and it seems it's not possible to entirely opt out of it...

Evernote Employees Can Read Your Notes, and There's No Way to Opt-Out

http://lifehacker.com/evernote-employees-can-read-your-notes...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13177971

If you are looking for alternatives to Evernote, I'd also recommend Notion.so

I'm not affiliated with the company, just an avid user.

+1. Notion is incredible.

As is Authorea! I can't wait to try it out when I get home.

+2. I love Notion and converted my whole team to it.

I wrote a windows store app that exported your data from evernote and imported it to onenote. Evernote complained on the grounds that it used their logo (which was fair enough) and then on the grounds that it used their name (I had called it EvernoteToOneNote). Eventually I gave up making changes and resubmitting the app.

Cool, thanks for letting us know

Well, the end of that was supposed to be "it's open sourced on github if anyone wants the code" but then I wandered off to check the URL and discovered I never uploaded it. Oops. I will though.

At home, and for project management at work, I'm an org-mode user. Got in the habit around 2005, and it's too useful to leave. But I've stopped using it for note-taking at work.

When my workplace switched from Google Apps to Office 365, I started experimenting with OneNote. And I have to say I've been extremely happy with it. The web app is quite good, and both the Windows and Android apps are excellent. I typically take meeting notes on an Android tablet, and they're immediately available for me at my desk. There are plenty of formatting and attachment options.

I'd never use OneNote for my personal/home use, because of cloud concerns and vendor lock-in. But if your workplace is in the MS ecosystem already? It's brilliant.

Like many large tech companies whose business is 100% reliant on free software (eg GNU/Linux) if you happen to prefer to run a free software desktop (say, GNU/Linux) you're pretty much stuffed in terms of native clients.

Nixnote is a great client, and I stuck with it for a few years, but seems to be maintained entirely independently of the mothership.

I realise there's some economies of scale in there, but absent any great contribution code-wise back to the free software community that they rely on, perhaps providing and maintaining a native client would be a well-received token gesture.

Anyone know of self-hostable alternatives for this sort of service? I have never used Evernote or OneNote but always been intruguied.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9206002

I use org-mode with Syncthing. It's imperfect, but it's still pretty great — and I own all of my data, which is important.

I can't recomend Syncthing enough, most "cloud apps" can be replaced pretty effictively by vim, Syncthing, and some obscure unix tool. I will also agree that it isn't perfect but I haven't seen anything better yet.

Started to use org-mode recently after seeing its features. Do you have guides you'd recommend for someone learning emacs and org-mode?

The built-in emacs tutorial is good, as I recall, but I went through it 15 years or so ago.

For org-mode, the documentation on their site is good, but I also found myself referencing this [0] site a lot. The author happened to do a lot of things in ways I liked, or near enough that I could borrow their config and tune it to my own preferences. Borrowed piecemeal, not wholesale. I recommend starting with stock org-mode and emacs and only adding pieces as you understand them. Otherwise you end up with a non-stock configuration and other people may not be able to help you out as readily because you can't identify whether erroneous behavior is emacs or your specific configuration.

[0] http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

It's not really a guide, but I strongly recommend newcomers take a look at emacs prelude (https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude), which is a really good starter kit. I recommend turning guru-mode off (AFAICT its only use is to holler at you to use C-n instead of down-arrow), and turning helm on everywhere.

I know a lot of folks really like spacemacs — I'm not a fan of the vi keybindings, or of its version of emacs-style keybindings, but regardless it's a really well-made emacs starter kit.

If you have a Synology NAS, you can use Synology Note Station.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/6.0/packages/NoteStation

Maybe [Braindump][0]?

I'm too heavily invested in org-mode to switch to this, but it does seem like the best fit for this sort of service.

[0]O https://github.com/levlaz/braindump

I use Zim Wiki. It's not as feature complete (no web access, no mobile clients), but it's the best solution I could find (for Linux).

I love Quiver - no mobile app yet but amazing UI and format.

I've been using QOwnNotes [0] for a while now, and while it's not quite a drop-in replacement for Evernote yet (there's no web clipper and the mobile apps are a bit rubbish), the pace of development is really impressive.

[0] http://www.qownnotes.org/

I'm less addicted to evernote itself than to its web clipper. I have things clipped in evernote from years ago that no longer exist anywhere else and that includes the wayback machine. It could be stored in markdown files that I search using grep for all I care.

Indeed. This is the killer feature for me. I learned my lesson in the past by just storing URLs which later point to nothing.

The EN web clipper is impressively good, and until I find a replacement I'll have to stay with EN.

There are good web clippers from most vendors (Notebook, OneNote, Keep etc). Did you try them?

https://www.zoho.com/notebook/web-clipper.html https://www.onenote.com/clipper

A paid Pinboard account will store backups of the pages you bookmark, so that might be a solution.

If you're looking for a lightweight Evernote alternative with markdown, real-time collaboration, and wiki-style organisation: We're building Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com).

Useful article. I have been a paying customer for a long while even though I have stopped using Evernote. Exporting everything to markdown, and closing shop might be in my future.

For what it does Evernote is a great product. My issue with Evernote, OneNote, etc. is that I spend too much time saving things that I end up never referencing again.

Well, people are still using Google services. Why is this any different??

I recently signed up for Evernote Premium. The price is quite high, but so far I haven’t found any alternatives that are so convenient and can sync between multiple devices.

I'd love switch to OneNote but it keeps crashing when I try to login on Android on my Nexus 4. I'm honestly at a loss of what to do.

tried uninstalling and reinstalling the app?

Oh yeah. No dice. I'm not even sure how to troubleshoot this and I'm guessing they don't have support for the free version.

I'm really bummed--I've heard nothing but good things, liked trying the desktop app and wanted to give mobile a spin. Unfortunately, I need a setup that is fully device agnostic, so not getting mobile to work would be a deal breaker for me.

Any suggestions for other things to try?

Factory reset of the phone maybe? Sounds like an awful inconvenience. Although its good to backup and refresh every now and then. Clean out all the trash

an alternative could be google keep, really great with multiple devices and you can pin important notes too

Export was easy - now the evernote staff, their neighbours and even their friends can read all our evernotes, just ask them for a copy on the way out!

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