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 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.

[1] http://orgmode.org/

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.

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.

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 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.

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 would pay Backblaze double if they kept past versions.

Colin Percival (the guy who maintains it) is also amazing with support - he was responding to my emails on Christmas day!

Every platform i've tried it on has worked okay.

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).

Rule 1 of backups is "don't keep your files and your backups in the same place". Pretty much common sense.

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).

Is anybody developing something like this?

http://www.notebooksapp.com

So you'd trade off one unreliable and out-of-your-control service and replace it with something fundamentally the same?

There's at least as many horror stories of users losing Dropbox data as there are for lost Evernote data.

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 ...

(I'm a google employee, but I'm interested as a recent heavy user of Drive.)

If we assume google counts Drive users the way they count Plus users, it probably has a stellar track record. :)

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...

- allows exporting all the data

- allows taking handwritten notes and drawings with a decent Android client

https://github.com/owncloud/notes

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?

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.

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.

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.

Main advantages over mediawiki:

* no database, only plain text files (more hackable in a good way)

* built to be a team tool, not Wikipedia (plugins, auth)

(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?]

vi todo.txt

rsync -av todo.txt [email protected]:notes

That's what I do. Seems to work.

(blah blah email us about HN-readers discount blah blah)

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.

[0]: http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/devonth...

[1]: http://camlistore.org