Is Evernote Really Everlasting?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Something happened this week that I honestly didn’t think would ever happen. Evernote crashed! My beloved “second brain” was down for several hours on Tuesday and had issues throughout the day. This was due to a DDoS attack – a cyber attack where criminals attempting to disable a business’s functionality, by sending an overwhelming amount of data to a company’s systems.

If you are a regular reader you know that basically my whole life is on Evernote; my blog posts, book chapters, favorite recipes, gift ideas… everything. So when Evernote when down I panicked. A rational part of me knew that it would all be working again in a few hours, but I still spent those hours worrying what I would do if Evernote were down for a few days, or worse, what if it never came back?

If Evernote’s downtime also sent you spiraling into a panic, I have some good news — you can back up everything you have on Evernote, which could prevent us from being caught short if it happens again. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Download the desktop version of Evernote to your computer. Once this has been downloaded Evernote should store all of your notebooks on your computer. On Windows 8 these can be found in the AppData folder and in the Library folder on Mac.

2. If you’ve set automated back ups from your computer to a hard drive, make sure the Evernote folders are included. Then if anything happens to your account just copy this data back to where you found it and your Evernote account should be good as new.

3. If you want to be prepared for the worst you need to export your notebooks from the Evernote application. You are given a choice of exporting in an Evernote specific format or to HTML. This way you will still have access to your notebooks even if Evernote is down, and if you save to HTML you could potentially import your notes to another service.

I feel better knowing that my Evernote content is safely backup up now. But I couldn’t help but think about all the people who tell me they don’t want to “go digital” for fear that all of their content will be lost. I’ll admit I thought about grabbing a notebook and trying to write down everything saved in Evernote when it went down. But keeping your stuff online can be safe if you follow a few simple tips:

• Try not to use the same password for every application. I often tell people to make your password a mantra, this way you’ll be branding it into your brain and moving closer to what you want to achieve. Please remember though that the longer your password the more time it takes to hack, so a password like ‘losetwentypounds’ is better then ‘dieting’.
• Sign up for google’s two step authentication for your gmail account to protect your emails.
• When on social media be aware of what you’re sharing with the world, for example don’t give out your mom’s maiden name.
• If you don’t know where something came from – don’t download it. Similarly be aware of accepting friend request from people you don’t know
• Make use of software like find my iPhone, which allows you to remotely erase your data in case your phone is stolen.

How did you feel about Evernote going down?