Ask HN: How did you migrate off Evernote? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did you migrate off Evernote?

45 pointsgitgud42 comments

After hearing the news I think it’s finally time to move on, or at least backup my data.

There’s a few export options and 3rd party tools. Any have any recommendations?

I did this in January 2021, over a weekend. I loved evernote and over 6 or so years became a prolific user. But their changes slowed the app down so much it became unusable. I needed to move, in one fell swoop.

First, I needed to decide where I will migrate to. The options were a few open source alternatives, Apple Notes, MS OneNote, and Google Keep.

I evaluated Apple Notes first. It was usable, met my criteria, and was a candidate for consideration.

Next, I looked at Notion. I fell in love with it immediately. Right off the bat I started replicating my personal operating system from Evernote in Notion. With every step, my grin widened. I kept a list of open questions, and most of them I was intuitively able to figure out as I grew familiar with the usage. After two or so hours Notion was a clear winner.

Key consideration: Notion is perfect for me. It fits my mental model, and allows me to do most of the things I want to. However, some people hate it. Please don't take my word for it.

Now, the migration. Notion has the ability to import from Evernote. It worked for many small notes. However, some larger journal notes did not import. I made a list of those that did not import, and copy-and pasted them.

It took roughly 12 or so hours of work. On Monday, I closed Evernote, and started using Notion. I had to go back to Evernote a small handful of times to fish something out that did not come over.

I rate the migration as an 8/10. Some pain points, but doable without great pain. Roughly on the order of magnitude like setting up a new laptop from scratch.

It's been 2.5 years. I am still a raving fan. +++ would recommend, but Notion is opinionated and not for everyone.

P.S. Recently I started using OneNote because a client of mine is on Microsoft's tooling. It's passable, but has some rough edges.

I just deleted it.

The last time HN said "Time to ditch Evernote!", I figured I should take a look at what I've stored and see what I should keep and what I should junk. After looking at the data, I realized that these tools are black holes of information. Things go in and never come back out again. Habitually storing information I'll never look at again is the digital version of hoarding. It was a compulsion and I needed to stop. So I deleted it.

I "replaced" it with obsidian in the sense that I still need somewhere to keep track of things I'm actively working on. I don't much like it, though. I wished there was a WYSIWYG note taking app that allowed you to easily embed images and videos.

I'm in the process of migrating from Evernote to Joplin, doing a careful migration by individual notebooks (with a total of 19,959 notes in Evernote). So far it has been reasonably painless; for example, I have a few Evernote features to work out how to manage, such as text searches on scanned images. I had tried a number of other tools (Obsidian, Loqseq, Notion, Bear, Apple Notes) and Joplin seems to fit my use cases the best.

I left Evernote long ago, before I had much invested in it. One day it blurred all my notes in Windows. I don't know how else to describe it. Every letter in every note was unbearably fuzzy. Nothing I did helped, and Evernote support gave up on it.

I didn't really migrate to anything. I started keeping keeping my web clippings in Pocket, and text in a big old text file called "Brain." Eventually I moved to Tiddlywiki for a month or two, then Obsidian, where I am now. I have (and still do) use Git to backup my notes, which works pretty well, and got in on early-bird pricing on Sync to make it even easier.

TiddlyWiki! - One of the best and most underrated apps anywhere - seriously, check it out - I promise you'll be impressed even if it's not ultimately the best choice for you.

I'm in the process of migrating OneNote over to TW now. TiddlyWiki is extremely solid and stable, totally open (and hackable if you want to do that), capable of doing a surprising variety of things well (esp. with some plug-ins to add new capabilities), includes decent encryption, and stores your notes in a plain HTML file, though there are several ways to keep/sync TW to the cloud, too (requires a backend server or file sharing, obviously...) Being entirely JS/Browser based is the reason my 20-year-old TiddlyWikis still work as well today as when I created them.

The biggest advantage is that YOU are totally in control, with NO need to rely on any Evilcorp's support or services to access to your most important info.

Surprised to hear no mention of Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/). I switched from Evernote to Notion years ago and finally switched beginning of this year from Notion -> Obsidian.

Top reasons:

- local first files stored in markdown format (somewhat future-proof); this also allows a Git repo sync

- multiple ways of syncing Vaults (their term for a workspace); can store Vaults on iCloud, Dropbox, or with Obsidian's Sync service which is E2E encrypted

- rich plugin ecosystem

- can style pages with CSS and run various code, like javascript, from inside the editor

- Graph view and Canvas are extraordinarily useful visualizations of your data

- supportive and prolific community, from their forums, to YouTube creators and bloggers; simply search "Obsidian intro" or "Obsidian tips" or "Moving to Obsidian from ___" for inspiration

Every time someone mentions Obsidian, I'm reminded that I like it, but not as much as paying $8 USD monthly for being able to sync notes to my other devices.

I pay a couple of cents per GB per month for rsync.net, and I understand they're very different use cases, but why is syncing my 40 MB of notes so expensive?

Obsidian runs on a local folder of files on your device, so there are a dozen different sync services you can use including several free options, e.g. Git, Syncthing, etc.

With Obsidian Sync, your $8 don't only go towards syncing. It helps Obsidian remain profitable and 100% user-supported (no VC investors). Subsidizing costs in pursuit of growth is what got Evernote here.

I sync with Google drive and Drive Sync on Android for free.

If you mean for personal use? I tried various note taking apps before I settled on Joplin.

I like that its open source and has a community that is helpful and people are always wrting extensions for it. Also the cross device syncing works really well with dropbox and I was already using that service.

Its not perfect but I much preferred it something like notion personally which felt overkill in terms of power/features, fiddly and had an awful mobile experience

    Evernote > Export ENEX file.

    Joplin   > Import ENEX file.

https://github.com/laurent22/joplin

Exported all the notes into Evernote's .enex format (to satisfy my hoarding instinct), and manually copy-pasted the notes that I actually use into .md files in Obsidian.

Haven't looked back since.

i left evernote ages back - they for some reason turned all my text entires into pdf files !!! I tried them again much later when they were promising better things, but compared to what i was using, it was slow and not as enjoybale to run, so never looked at it again. I ran Notational velocity for ages, but have tried obsidian and Joplin (Joplin was v good for almost all uses) but I've settled on using FSNotes which works very well for me. Again, it's got some weird stuff but its easy to ignore. Joplin was probably th best all rounder, by synch of phoen and laptop could lead me questioning what was where, so it didn't get relied upon the same as FSNotes does. I still use both in reality though. Joplin has that free high quality app appeal - it really is better than almost all those pay to use apps. I've tried so many its unreal, i even have a super long subscription to some app (no longer on my devices) - big on promises, lousy on delivery.

If you mean which services I went to, I pulled the plug on proprietary or at least non-open-source services and walled gardens. I'm now using GitLab Pages to host both my blog and the notes I had there. I use Sphinx to manage structure and templating.

I have created a /notes folder which gets made available under the same domain ( https://jdsalaro.com/blog/category/notes/ ) which will contain all stuff I had in Evernote.

The content of my Evernote account is exported via the API and each note put into a note.md file with the first line as title, tags ( private, note) and "inferred" headings.

Within that folder there's a /private one which never gets built ( using tox ) nor published to the public version of my blog. There's a separate GitLab pipeline which only builds /private and makes it available under Gitlab pages but uses another non-public project, so you need to be logged in and a member of the repo to be able to see it.

The good thing is that I can read them everywhere and if necessary edit stuff via mobile ( Browser tab with GitLab VS Code IDE added to home screen or Labcoat )

Since everything is backed up using git, both the public and private versions, I don't have to worry about losing data.

Cool side-effects are that I've started using and understanding Sphinx to manage the structure and templating and even started poking around helping with the project ( https://github.com/executablebooks/sphinx-external-toc/issue... )

Really, we had the power all along but became complacent. We've got to be the change we want to see on the internet.

Do you have a copy of the script you used to export all your notes?

I'm currently faced with this existential problem myself.

I can certainly put it online if you want to have a look at it. It's very hacky, though, as I'll hopefully never need it again.

Today I was about to go on a small vacation, so no laptop. Where can I ping you when I've uploaded it? ( or you can ping me, info in my profile )

Have you tried using the export function and just processing that? That's also an alternative that has worked for friends ( the HTML export one )

Shoot me an email at govind <at> automorphic <dot> ai

Has online whos been using Evernote as a bit of a paperless office (receipts, scanned docs etc) successfully switched across to Paperless-ngx [1]. Interested in if there’s an easy way to export from Evernote into paperless.

1. https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

Notion has a native Evernote import, I just used that: https://www.notion.so/help/import-data-into-notion

I've gone to DevonThink.

My Evernote contains 22k+ notes collected since late 2011.

Nearly all notes are images/links collected online and tagged.

DevonThink contains all the archiving tools that I wished Evernote had. It also has an import from Evernote tool which seems to be working very well.

What I am hoping is that because it is a paid for software installation and has a stable history it will not be messed with in the same way Evernote has been.

I've also exported all my notes via Evernote Legacy as HTML files and archived them.

My yearly Evernote subscription doesn't expire until start of Sept so I have time to continue migration before I leave for good :-(

Evernote was ok for a little bit, but the only thing it really did for me was search... once I realized that I switched tactics. I organized my life into domains, and got okay at using grep to replace it. My saving grace that I would pay twice for is https://typora.io. Though worth mentioning Apple Notes has come a long way.

I wrote about a failed attempt to migrate from Evernote to Google Docs in https://jlforrest.wordpress.com/2021/01/21/an-unsuccessful-e....

I eventually just migrated to OneNote and copied my notes over manually.

I’ve been using Microsoft OneNote. You don’t need an office subscription to use it, it syncs between all my devices and computers.

You may consider trying Backupery for Evernote app: https://www.backupery.com/products/backupery-for-evernote/ It's a desktop tool that makes automatic backups of Evernote data.

Does this work with the new Evernote?

There's a tool called Yarle, aka "Yet another rope ladder from Evernote" that helps you migrate your data to Markdown:

https://github.com/akosbalasko/yarle

I was never a big Evernote user, but I did use Yarle to migrate some old Evernote data to Obsidian.

Try https://logseq.com/

It was a long time ago for me. IIRC, I installed Nixnote on Ubuntu and it was fairly straightforward to simply download everything to local files after that. I do not know whether Evernote still permits that loosey-goosey API access by such a Unix program, though.

While browsing around my synology, I found their own note taking app - synology notes. Export from evernote and import to notes took about five minutes and I've been using it ever since.

It looks and works almost the same so I didn't even notice much of a change.

I ended up using Dropbox Paper, since it came along with my Dropbox subscription, anyway.

How about for scanned PDFs of personal papers — car registration receipts, tax returns, etc.?

(I know, the sensible thing would be to just scan documents to individual PDF files with descriptive titles, but I've been using Evernote for many years.)

i use a cool little program called cherrytree[0]. i don't use it on my phone as i really don't use my phone, but i save the password-protected cherrytree data in dropbox and have cherrytree installed on my computers.

edit: to use it with android, it looks like this is the app for that [1]

[0] https://www.giuspen.net/cherrytree/ [1] https://github.com/FFDA/SourCherry/

It's funny how my own perceptions have changed over time. Maybe ten years ago, I would have looked at that and thought "careless user interface design". Nowadays, that very same thing somehow conveys trustworthiness to me.

it's great. it's also a diary. just open it and press F8 and you have a new post for today.

A guide how to move to Craft https://www.craft.me/s/Z6FdPQtMfh3KRU

I also used to use Evernote a lot, but ever since they moved to their current app it became so slow that it was unusable I just moved to Apple notes with folders.

We’ve just phased it out, slowly and steadily.

Decided to export the legacy notes as a HTML dump (which is apparently supported) and worry about it later.

I haven’t yet tried the feature though.

macOS, legacy desktop app: You can export each note to a PDF by highlighting them all, print, then save to PDF. The Evernote client will export each one to a PDF in a loop.

I think there are options for adding the note folder to the PDF header too.

This gets you a read only archive that should be readable far into the future without needing a note reading app that understands Evernote’s export XML (just files and PDF).

Apple notes let’s you import Evernote XML too.

Sorry to go a bit off topic, but what was the “latest news” about Evernote?

Someone on HN reported that nearly all the remaining Evernote staff have been laid off post-acquisition. [0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641

If Joplin wouldn't be so slow...

That's the only part I dislike of it, but so far, Joplib is the only that covers my needs:

- Markdown with advanced plugins like Mermaid

- True hierarchical notes, tags are optional

- Cross-platform, including mobile

- Offline, or encrypted third-party cloud storage

- Sync across any number of devices

- Easy to migrate from

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