I have started the migration of material out of Evernote in earnest. The idea is to make my Evernotes available in Obsidian in markdown. I don’t want all that stuff from Evernote to clutter up my current collection in Obsidian, so I am creating a second Obsidian Vault, in which all Evernote exported material will reside. This way it is available in Obsidian, but separate from the more organised material.
The route to getting there is:
- Exporting Evernote notebooks 1 by 1 as ENEX file (Evernote’s xml format)
- Importing each ENEX file into Joplin as markdown as a separate notebook. Joplin is a well working note making app in its own right. Here I use it solely to translate ENEX files to markdown.
- Exporting the Joplin notebook as markdown to the location of the Obsidian Vault
I notice that sometimes importing ENEX doesn’t work perfectly. Usually because of some special characters used in a note or title of a note, sometimes because of the included images etc. Sometimes doing it again fixes it. Sometimes it isn’t. I’m not worried about that. I have the ENEX files available as archive, and can search them as well. Also none of it will likely be critical information, as I haven’t been missing it in the past 8 months or so that I didn’t use Evernote.
[UPDATE: What helps to fix imports into Joplin is removing large PDF’s included in Evernotes, as well as removing special characters from note titles (specifically underscores and commas, and adding titles to unnamed notes.]
[UPDATE 2: All material is now exported from Evernote, transformed in Joplin and exported again as regular markdown]
Having done this export / import, this completes my withdrawal from Evernote after I stopped using it last September, something I wanted to do since 2016 at least. I need to cancel my subscription by June, and will delete the notes in Evernote beforehand. Judging by my subscription history I have used exactly 10 years, from October 2010 to September 2020.
How to deal with the green elephant in the room?
After I quit using Gmail earlier this year, Evernote has become my biggest silo and single point of failure in my workflow. I have been using it since October 2010 with a premium account, and maintain some 4500 notes, about 25GB total in size. With my move away from Gmail, my use of Evernote has actually increased as well. Part of my e-mail triage process now is forwarding receipts etc to Evernote, before removing them from my mail box.
As with leaving Gmail, there are no immediately visible alternatives to Evernote, that cater to all convenient affordances I have become accustomed to. This was already apparant when I quit Gmail, when Peter Rukavina and I exchanged some thoughts about it. So in order to make the first steps towards ditching Evernote, I will follow the recipe I derived from leaving Gmail, as I presented it at the Koppelting conference in August.
Why do I want to leave?
It’s a single point of failure for both private and work related material
It’s on US servers, and I would like my own cloud instead
It’s not exportable in a general format
What I don’t like about Evernote
No easy way to get an overview or visualisation of my notes (although notes are easy to link, those links are not visible as a network)
No easy way to mine the total of notes, aside from regular search for specific notes
No way to let Evernote use my own cloud / server for storage
No reliable way to share with others who are not Evernote users themselves
What I like about Evernote
Really everything can be a note
It’s cross device (I consult material on my phone, and store e.g. boarding passes there during travel)
It has good webclippers for most browsers (allowing choosing the destination notebook, tags, and add remarks)
I can easily share to Evernote from most apps on my phone
I can e-mail material to it, while indicating destination notebook and adding tags
I can automate Evernote stuff with Applescript (I e.g. integrate Evernote with my other core tools Things (todo lists) and Tinderbox (mindmapping)
It makes handwritten stuff, images, and scans searchable (even if it doesn’t convert everything to text)
Next steps will be coming up with viable solutions and alternatives for each of those points, and see if I can then integrate those into a coherent whole again. Terry Frazier pointed me to The Brain again today on FB. The Brain is a tool I heavily used from 18 to 13 years ago. It turns out this mindmapping/note taking tool is still around. It currently works cross-device and has Android and iOS apps, and allows attaching files and navigating links in a visual way. It comes at a hefty price though, and still looks like it really is from 1998. Will explore a bit if it might fit my needs enough to give it another try.
[UPDATE 2021-02-27: I have left Evernote. Stopped using it in September 2020 in favor of Obsidian, and exported all the archives in February 2021.]
@ton Nice idea. I’ma big Obsidian fan, it’s been groundbreaking for me in laying down and distilling ideas/thoughts. Good to see another fan here!
Thank you for writing this up! I’m also on Evernote since March 2008. I will try @joplinapp for migration (fearing the export of 100s of notebooks). Why do you use @obsdmd instead of @joplinapp?
key diff for me is that @obsidianmd
is a viewer on flat text files, whereas @joplinapp
is sqlite. This allows me to view and manipulate notes with other apps as well, and sync them across devices using nextcloud. App decoupled from the content is a big plus for me.
@ton Not sure this work for me due to the high number of PDF attachments and embedded pictures that I have, how has that worked for you?
@frankm I had to remove large PDFs (>=10MB) from notes, in order for Joplin to do the conversion to markdown well. But those PDFs were already elsewhere in my filesystem (I usually added them to evernote to have them with me on the road). I transformed some 7k evernotes to markdown, resulting in markdown notes linking to/embedding over 19k images, docs and pdfs. About 2.5Gb in total, of which 2.4Gb are those 19k resources.
How was your experience with embedded graphics (jpg, png, etc.) in the migration?
key diff for me is that @obsidianmd is a viewer on flat text files, whereas @joplinapp is sqlite. This allows me to view and manipulate notes with other apps as well, and sync them across devices using nextcloud. App decoupled from the content is a big plus for me.
Makes sense, thank you for the addl info!
@ton This is the first time I heard about #ObsidianMd . I’ve heard people raving about #Joplin, but if Obsidian is a flat pile of markdown and Joplin uses SQLite, then Obsidian sounds more like the thing for me.
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Schools were closed again this week so both E’s and my work time was limited. The days I succeeded in gettng of to a good start were the ones where I got down to do something tangible right away because I prepared it the evening before. This week I
Did administrative things like meeting payroll, making the liquidity planning for the coming months and send some invoices
Created an overview of open data impact measurement frameworks that I’ve worked on over the years, for a client
Discussed and detailed the revised definition of done of a project
Created a second design version, and first full version of a story collection point for a citizen science project in Rotterdam
Created a first draft of an overview of all current national and European data related developments with timelines for legal, organisational and thematic timelines. This as a way to be able to anticipate actions for the Dutch Tactical Council on EU data I’m supporting this year.
Had the weekly client meetings
Enjoyed migrating slide decks into my self-hosted slide sharing set-up
Moved a decade worth of notes out of Evernote
Had a session with our personal finance advisor on pension planning
Y developed a fever towards the end of the week, and I took her for a Covid test. She was a bit scared but carried herself bravely, and it was quickly done. It took 48hrs for the results to arrive, so during that time we quarantined our household as per the measures in place. The results came back negative, and Y was relieved she could go out and play in the park again. I’m relieved too, also that she can go to school tomorrow.
This week in….1861
This week in 1861 saw the birth of Santiago Rusiñol, a Spanish Catalan artist. While famous for his later colorful landscapes and gardens, earlier he lived in Paris, capturing city life.
Interior of Café des Incohérents 16 bis rue Fontaine, Montmartre, Paris, by Santiago Rusiñol, 1889/90, public domain image
Avenue of plane trees, by Santiago Rusiñol, 1916, public domain image
photo by me, London 2012, license CC BY SA
Today I deleted the Green Elephant. Ever since I removed Gmail and other Google services back in 2016, Evernote was next in line, but harder to get rid off.
Last year July when I started using Obsidian, I almost immediately realised and quickly experienced how it opened up space for me to finally ditch Evernote. I used Evernote last in August 2020. This February I exported all my Evernotes and started bringing them into my growing collection of mark down text files, with Obsidian as a viewer.
Today I deleted my Evernote account. It felt slightly odd. Even if I hadn’t touched Evernote in over 8 months, even if I had exported everything and double checked that it worked, there still was some lingering sense of dread of the finality of punching the delete button. But after 11 years of Evernote, the Green Elephant is no longer in my room, and another single point of failure and the final silo that part of my workflow depended upon is now gone.
I have been playing around with various ENEX imports all morning. Joplin’s is one of the best. For me, though, Joplin’s MD export is a non-starter. In the export, Joplin loses the create/modify dates of the original notes. This is an important aspect of a note for systems that are file-based. Unfortunately, the author does not see this as a bug.
On the whole, Joplin is nice. However, I am looking to maintain an MD file-based system, and losing creation date completely destroys the system. — At least without some scripting to get it back.
For export, it looks like I will forego Joplin’s import/export in favor of evernote2md’s direct conversion. (https://github.com/wormi4ok/evernote2md) — It doesn’t seem to handle EN tables as well as Joplin, but does a good job of everything else. It will even prepend frontmatter metadata to each note!
Thank you for pointing to evernote2md. Will definitely try that out. You’re right Joplin doesn’t retain the original dates when exporting to .md, so I’ve been keeping the originals alongside it, so I can look up the dates. I keep dates in my markdown notes as tags (e.g. #2021/10/24 for todqy), and add the original whenever I adopt a note from Evernote into my current set.