Goodbye Evernote
Finally Shutting down my Evernote Account
As of today, I’ve officially said goodbye to my Evernote account. For over a decade, Evernote was more than just a note-taking app—it was the digital backbone of how I organized and retained information. Up until about 2020, I had used Evernote as my primary note-taking and document retention application. In fact, it was more the latter: a well-organized (through tags and notebooks) collection of web pages I wanted to retain, digital documents I’d been sent, and documents scanned in with Doxie. Unfortunately for me and for them, Evernote stagnated on the development for quite some time and by the time they began work in earnest on their new interface, around 2019 I believe, it was too little, too late.
And the acquisition by an Italian company was the final nail in the coffin, where they changed the free tier to only 50 notes. So, like many who were deeply invested in it, I had to let go when the platform stagnated and its priorities shifted away from what made it great, my thousands of notes languished in my account and I have finally deleted the account and the data. 😢
Fond Evernote Memories
I’ve been an Evernote user since May 19th, 2008—nearly 17 years! Over the years, Evernote taught me the value of tagging as a powerful organizational tool. It was more than just notes; it was a curated collection of web pages, scanned documents (courtesy of my trusty Doxie scanner), and the mobile app parsed business cards, populating Google or Outlook contacts with the person’s information. I even used its short-lived Symbian version and even tested a beta of Evernote for Maemo.
The golden era for me was around 2012, when IFTTT (If This Then That) allowed nearly unlimited recipe activations. I used it to send all sorts of digital exhaust—calendar entries, social media interactions, Fitbit stats—to Evernote for safekeeping. And I came across a presentation of Creating REAL Threat Intelligence with Evernote, essentially turning my local notebook into a quick-reference Threat Intelligence Platform, or “TIP". It was a time when Evernote felt like the ultimate catch-all for my digital life. I curated a publicly accessible notebook filled with recipes that I shared with friends and family.
I even visited Evernote’s offices once and attended an event where they gave out YakPak bags. I still use one of those bags—a chef’s knife bag—as my go-to travel companion whenever I’m cooking on the road. The other, a stylish shoulder bag, holds dice and my 5th Edition DnD books, being a sort of #TTRPG go-bag.
Evernote’s core philosophy that “data should be portable” was incredibly inspiring to me, both personally and professionally. As someone who works in cybersecurity and risk management, I’ve always made sure similar provisions for data portability are included in the SaaS contracts my companies sign with vendors.
Migrating away
Luckily for me, the decline of Evernote pretty much coincided with the rise of Obsidian.
Over the years, I had a few friends mock me for using an app that could be replaced with something like Apple Notes. Well, if those friends would similarly like to free their notes and unshackle them from a proprietary format, I humbly point out Jimmy, a tool that will convert from more formats than I've even heard of to #Markdown, with an eye toward Obsidian and Zettlekasten oriented notebooks.
The data portability was key, and major kudos to all those that have written code for the near-seamless transition of the notes to a new and open platform!