There are many horror stories on the web of users losing their data. I thought it was already well known that Evernote software cannot be trusted. Recently, two HN users made comments about data loss[1][2].
I'm baffled that users continue to trust it. I do understand that it's a slick product with nice features but if it fails the primary purpose (save the data and also retrieve it later), the GUI bells & whistles are meaningless. (Example[3].) In other words, programming a flashy drag&drop tool that saves data to /dev/null negates the point, right?
Personally, I've been using ASCII text files as "notebooks" for 20 years and have never lost a thing. Understandably, that workflow is not usable for mobile devices and cloud sync. For the folks that can't use text files, is there really no other alternative product to Evernote that has a reliable track record for saving the customers' data?
> I thought it was already well known that Evernote software cannot be trusted.... I'm baffled that users continue to trust it.
It's unfair and condescending to blame the user when companies like Evernote actively mislead them. The service called Ever-note, with an elephant as their logo/icon. Their website even features this slogan: "Your life's work. For everything you’ll do, Evernote is the workspace to get it done."
Most HNers realize that cloud syncing and backups aren't the same thing, that cloud services do fail, and when they do customer service is likely to be woefully unhelpful. And that the marketing departments at companies like Evernote overpromise because it serves their growth strategy and they never face repercussions. But that doesn't mean that any of this is okay.
This is on Evernote not its users, and we only help Evernote when we downplay this as old news or presume average users should adopt some of the far too sophisticated alternatives mentioned in this thread (like org-mode).
I agree. Nothing beats pure text files. These days though, I save them to my Dropbox folder so they're accessible anywhere. I feel like I'm getting the best of both worlds this way.
As a slight enhancement on pure text files: Org-mode [1] for Emacs! I really only use the outlining, and sometimes the TODO-item support, but having nice navigation/subtree folding on top of a file that's still plain text is really great.
I have a few three-line scripts in my ~/bin that commit my Org files to a git repo and push to my remote server, or pull changes. Lets me have copies on multiple machines and works really well.
I do this. What happens if Dropbox deletes a file though, on the server? Then it would vanish from the computer as well. If it was an important but rarely checked file, you might not notice for months or years, by which time it might be difficult to retrieve a copy.
Does anyone have more info on the likelihood of this + the possible ways to solve it if it happens? It occurred to me that most of my important files are potentially deletable via Dropbox.
Dropbox is not a backup. Dropbox is a file sync service with some limited backup features. AFAIK it also hasn't actually ever reported profits, but it's well enough backed and dominant enough that it's unlikely to disappear.
What should happen in the case of missing a file deletion until beyond Dropbox's 30-day versioning windows is that you retrieve the file from your automated backups of at least one of the computers that Dropbox is syncing to.
>Dropbox is not a backup. Dropbox is a file sync service with some limited backup features
Agreed. Dropbox is more of a consumer disaster recovery solution than a backup solution. If your computer hard drive dies, you lose zero data. On the sysadmin side of IT, we distinguish between backups and replication. Backups have retention and are usually slow to recover from if you need to recover large amounts of data. Replication is often used to maintain a "ready to go" copy of the data. If a server dies a horrible death, boot the standy replication partner and we are back online. Dropbox can work this way of you have it installed on two PCs.
If your data is important, don't leave it to any single service to protect it. If you have truly important data, go ahead and use online backup/sync services, but also make your own point-in-time backups to avoid the accidental deletion of a file you only look at once per year. A cheap USB hard drive that holds monthly or quarterly backups, kept in a safe deposit box, will suffice for most people as that third line of defense.
>What should happen in the case of missing a file deletion until beyond Dropbox's 30-day versioning windows is that you retrieve the file from your automated backups of at least one of the computers that Dropbox is syncing to.
What would you use for these automatic backups? I use backblaze for my whole computer. However, I think they also only keep file changes for 30 days past change date.
I use TimeMachine and three large harddrives - a pair in raid1 that TimeMachine does it's normal thing with, then another drive that powers up once a week and rsyncs off that raid pair.
If I were _properly_ paranoid, I'd also set up an off-site backup drive - perhaps using TahoeLAFS. I figure the chance of Dropbox losing my data at the same time as I lose three bits of electronics at my house is pretty small.
For non OSX users, you can fairly trivially roll-your-own TimeMachine-like snapshot backup process in Linux using rsync, cron, and a little bash - it's not like Apple invented it... It might even be just as simple using Powertools on Windows.
I use Crashplan, which is a little slower and clunkier than other services but keeps infinite versions of files, including deleted files (unlike Backblaze).
I could try Crashplan again. When I attempted it before, it never successfully synced, despite hours spent emailing system reports back and forth with their support reps.
I would pay Backblaze double if they kept past versions.
It worked fine for me until I got more data than my plan supported. It was screwed after that, I deleted some stuff I didn't need, but it had already gotten into a borked state and support couldn't even help me fix it.
They wouldn't delete your file randomly for no reason, unless for a bug. But user data is top priority at Dropbox (it's what their business is all about), so you're extremely unlikely to loose it. They most likely have lots of redundancy.
Now if you accidentally delete something and want to recover it, you have 30 days to do so with a free account. With a paid account, your history is kept forever (basically files are never deleted).
You can always backup both your Dropbox and Evernote to a single place. I'm the founder of https://revert.io and that's exactly what we've built our service to do. Love any feedback if you want to try it out. Thanks!
It's best if you don't think of Dropbox as a backup service. People treat it that way (and I'm guilty of it too) but a file-sync provider is really a very different thing at heart.
Why would you sync the backup? Just backup the contents of your Dropbox folder to a hard drive every night. Then it's on the hard drive and Dropbox can't access it.
Exactly. Evernote and its clones seem to give you the best of both worlds in one product but in practice they do a half assed job of both. It's sort of like the windows vs unix mentality of having one behemoth do everything vs chaining independent tasks together. When I hit save and dropbox just syncs in the background, that's pretty much the best use of my time and also IMO the simplest solution to the problem.
I was setting up my new desktop to dual boot Debian and Windows. In the interest of saving space, I tried to have Dropbox in both systems target the same directory to sync. I'm not precisely sure what happened - I think the folder hadn't finished pulling in all the files before I logged out - but it somehow trashed everything in my lab's shared directory. Thank god for their API and their automatic file versioning, or I would never have gotten out of that pickle.
Baffled? And exactly how would "everyone" know that "evernote software cannot be trusted".
Is there a central repository of information that is obvious to check that would point that out? Or are you assuming that it's just one of those things that's totally obvious and that people should know because everyone is up to date on every situation with respect to companies on the web. [1]
For the record I don't trust any of these services and never have. I roll my own solution which I am in control of. I've found problems with time machine on apple, so although I do use that in most cases I also clone disks, [2] use rsync and have offsite backups and so on.
[1] Like "Google tends to neglect and kill products" or "Paypal can kill your account in a heartbeat" and so on?
[2] SuperDuper works great for cloning Macs I've been using it for years.
However, actually the BEST use case for Evernote is to store random and not so important notes. And Evernote has the best mobile client. So I'm still using Evernote all the time.
Also, it is amazing there is no startup trying so solve problem Evernote is solving:
- fast mobile client
- easy way to take screenshots, photos, records, hand notes and make annotations
- fast search and OCR
- solid desktop client (can be just some simple HTML editor - nothing fancy)
For me, it is ok to have Dropbox as backend storage (in HTML or whatever).
Notebooks on iOS/Mac/Win does most of this (no OCR or annotations) and stores data in plain text where possible, supports open standard WebDAV along with popular cloud storage for sync.
You're probably right - unless in "other solutions" you include things like ext2/3, HFS, FAT32, NTFS etc.
I guess my (badly made) point is that if you're complaining about the resilience/reliability of and app that uses a cloud based storage solution, the alternatives aren't limited to other cloud based storage solutions. If you want to fix the problem, fix it - don't just trade it for the same problem with a different service to blame and some unknown difference in risk.
There are _many_ greybeards out there who've seen and solved (properly) all the problems with hard drive based storage, and can easily explain the difference between raid, backup, and archive. They will debate the requirements for onsite vs offsite backup and archive, they will have opinions about how many spindles and how many different models and brands of drives to use. They'll have war stories of the time they heard of a file system recovered from an errant root "rm -rf /" with nothing more than a vim window available to use.
_Those_ guys will do a better job for you that Evernote or Dropbox or GoogleDrive or ...
Given that we don't know the number of active users of either service, I think it'd be difficult to draw any conclusions about their relative failure rates [based on horror stories.]
If we assume google counts Drive users the way they count Plus users, it probably has a stellar track record. :)
At the very least, there are stories about Google Account loss, which while perhaps not technically being "data loss stories", are in effect exactly the same thing.
I don't remember the details, but a friend got badly burnt a couple of years back with some "known problem" where switching from free to paid googleapps accounts made _everything_ disappear...
Exactly. Never trust any one solution with everything. I use Evernote and Dropbox, but I also keep incremental backups of everything with crashplan, and take regular snapshots of my primary hard drive. It would be a pain if Evernote lost something, but never a catastrophe.
Especially thinking of a synced cloud folder as a backup is just asking for grief.
Having so many copies was expensive advice perhaps 20 years ago, but now it makes a lot of sense.
Drive capacities have increased so much that, unless you're trying to create your own copy of Megaupload or The Pirate Bay, you can easily afford to maintain many duplicates of any data you care about. The real problem is bit rot. How can you be sure that random corruptions that might accumulate over the years don't cause you to lose an important file or two or two thousand?
A service like crashplan or backblaze should largely take care of that for you. Unlimited incremental backups for a fixed monthly fee. If you discover a file has been corrupted, you just go back in the incremental versions until you get to a good copy. If $5/month is still too much, you can even point it at one of your own machines. You still get the incremental backups; you just have to provide the storage space.
Either way, the key is not just to have multiple copies of the most recent iteration of a file, but to have an automated system of archiving past versions - of everything - as well.
I've been using text files as notebooks as well for a very long time. In the past I sometimes sent them to myself via email to have them available. Since I have an iphone I use the regular iphone notes app [1] and enable IMAP sync. I can read and edit them everywhere, on the phone, in the browser with webmail or in an mail client.
The only thing I'm missing is end to end encryption; with both ends being me (or the application I'm using at the moment).
Otherwise it's perfect for my use case: just notes for me and myself, just ASCII text, regular adding, rarely editing, no sharing, no other users, no versioning.
[1] I'm quite sure there is a similar solution for Android, I just never tried it there.
Is there no alternative that saves users' data? Of course there is. But you probably don't want to put anything sensitive into any of them. There's no shortage of bare bones Evernote type services out there. I've been running one for three years without a single user losing data. They tend to forget their usernames and passwords a lot but never the data. (Link in profile, won't plug it here).
I still use Evernote for things I needed to store a long time ago and never ported anywhere else. It boggles that mind that the very core of such a service, writing and reading data from some store, takes a backseat to all the other buttons and gadgets they wrap around it.
I have a personal mediawiki that I keep on a raspberry pi home server. It's much better than text files because of the hyperlinking, the history, the statistics and the formatting. It can also be viewed and edited by other family members if I so choose. I guess I could make it available outside the firewall with a password but I haven't really needed that. The cool thing about the PI is everything just works and it consumes almost no power so there isn't a significant ongoing expense to running it once it's set up.
OneNote is free, cross platform, syncs pretty well and keeps a local cache of all your notes in any of the desktop versions, which means you can independently back them up. And because of its history as a desktop app first, a backed up notebook can be opened in the app without caring about cloud state at all.
(disclaimer: I work at Microsoft but not on OneNote.)
Great, I thought and went right over to get it for my Kubuntu box. Oh right, not that sort of cross-platform.
But they offer a web version that tells me "Take your notes anywhere with OneNote" (except to a Linux desktop of course!). They're clearly big on this "anywhere" idea, something about accessing your notes from anywhere ... and then "The add-on works only in 32-bit Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, or Safari (Mac).".
It's no different to other companies but these things do start to grate after a while - "access from most browsers" or "access from most OS" obviously isn't as good a marketing tag as "anywhere".
/rant
It seems I can use it from my 64bit browser on Kubuntu but then it operates like Evernote's web app does.
[This is just how it is from my angle, really just feeding back in case others on Linux would have looked it up. Dare-say you can get it to work with WINE?]
"Personally, I've been using ASCII text files as "notebooks" for 20 years and have never lost a thing. Understandably, that workflow is not usable for mobile devices and cloud sync."
Does rsync.net backup versions of the files you store on it? If not, a pitfall with your workflow is that if you corrupt todo.txt (accidentally, or if there is a filesystem problem, etc.) and then push it via rsync, you'll have accidentally overwritten your "backup" with a corrupt copy.
Nothing in the cloud is actually safe. So, rather than completely dismissing Evernote, just make it safer by synching it with Google Docs or Dropbox or any other platform via cloudHQ. It'll provide you with a real-time sync of whatever is in your notebook, AND it'll save an archive folder for you in the other platform you synched it with (i.e. dropbox) in case something accidentally gets deleted from your Evernote notebook. Go to cloudhq.net and start the free trial. If you like the service, pay $10/mo to keep it going or just write a blog post about your experience with us and you'll get free sync service for a year. :)
I am one of the people whose negative comments about Evernote you reference.
The thing is, there really is nothing on the market that does what Evernote does. Sure, there are dozens (hundreds?) of good solutions for plain text notes. But Evernote also does paper. And photos (of signs, napkin drawings, etc). I have put tens of thousands of sheets of paper through it -- the latest (excellent) ScanSnap scanners will scan directly to Evernote.
And then it does dual-language OCR on those, in both English and (in my case) Japanese. That last bit is very important for almost everybody living outside of America -- you want the local language of your business documents to be OCR'd, but just about anywhere you also want English OCR. I have years worth of bills, business cards, etc in there, that I sometimes need to search against in either language.
There are personal database type apps out there than can do part of this, like EagleFiler, Yojimbo, and DevonThink, but nothing I am aware of syncs to the cloud so that you can both access and input any kind of data on any device you use. That part is the other killer Evernote feature. I/O everywhere.
The search function works decently and it works on the mobile devices, too. E.g., last week at the HN Tokyo event, the conversation drifted to the topic of registering one's personal seal (that Asian stamp, sometimes called a 'chop', that serves a signature). I was able to pull up the PDF of the official 2008 registration document for my own seal within a few seconds on my phone, while we were still talking about it.
That kind of ubiquity is really nice.
My problem with Evernote is the horrendous, truly awful client software (especially on the desktop, which is where I do 95%) of my use. I would not trust them to maintain my data without backups -- though I wouldn't trust any service that way -- but I have had Evernote lose data before it can be backed up. This is usually just the last page of notes, or the audio of a meeting, though, and not a huge set of data.
My workaround for that is to no longer use Evernote clients to take notes. It's just terrible at that job. Even on the highest end notebook Apple makes, for example, it literally can't keep up with typing after 2 pages of notes. And then it will crash, losing your last few paragraphs of notes and any audio recording.
So now I do all my note-taking in other apps, I record meetings and calls using other apps, and then I manually throw those things into Evernote. But (at least in my case) Evernote is mainly as a ubiquitously-available repository for inputting and/or searching and viewing of all paper mail, work bills, contracts, business cards, presentations from others, product catalogs, meeting notes, conference call audio, photos of whiteboards, passport applications and birth certificates for my kids, medical records, old tax returns, etc etc etc.
In other words, it is just a kind of gigantic network volume, with some added search indexes and (optionally) my own notes about the files it contains.
I am pretty confident that I will be able to move off of Evernote this year (but then again I think I said that last year and the year before). Dropbox is taking baby steps toward this -- they have added rudimentary searching of the contents of (some types of) your files, but are clearly years away where Evernote is.
DevonThink[0] -- an ancient, Mac-only personal DB -- has recently added Dropbox syncing. Their Mac app is incomparably better than Evernote's, despite being ancient, but even if the sync works well (I'm currently testing it out), their mobile apps are so bad they may as well not exist at all.
I think eventually, the mythical open-source "Evernote killer" that people talk about will emerge. Just as I assiduously read every thread on HN about Evernote (in hopes of learning of some new alternative), I watch every Camlistore[1] release with great interest.
I'm sure we will eventually get a standards-based, multiple-implementation solution because the problem is really just 'need a big pile of stuff in the cloud that I can add to, perform highly specific searches against, and view from anywhere'. But I don't see any signs that this will happen very soon.
Bugs will always exist :( - and even if your data is in the cloud it is always good make one more copy.
For example, you can use cloudHQ to backup to Dropbox: https://www.cloudHQ.net/backup_to/dropbox
I'm baffled that users continue to trust it. I do understand that it's a slick product with nice features but if it fails the primary purpose (save the data and also retrieve it later), the GUI bells & whistles are meaningless. (Example[3].) In other words, programming a flashy drag&drop tool that saves data to /dev/null negates the point, right?
Personally, I've been using ASCII text files as "notebooks" for 20 years and have never lost a thing. Understandably, that workflow is not usable for mobile devices and cloud sync. For the folks that can't use text files, is there really no other alternative product to Evernote that has a reliable track record for saving the customers' data?
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7010258
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7010558
[3]http://jasonkincaid.net/2014/01/evernote-the-bug-ridden-elep...