Evernote Migrant

DEVONthink
1

Hello

I’m new here and have for a little while been planning my escape/migration from Evernote and I’m looking for guidance from experts or folks who have experience of this transfer.

I do not have and do not want to use the Legacy version of Evernote, even if I still could, so I’m planning on exporting individual notebooks (about 50) containing my notes (about 10,500) and then importing the .enex files. I am 100% Mac based.

Many of my Evernote notes have attached PDF files which I’m assuming (probably wrongly) will have been OCR’d by Evernote but I’m guessing that OCR data is held by Evernote and does not become part of the actual PDFs that will be exported in the .enex file.

I’ve done plenty of searching and have found some older threads but I’m looking for guidance on the best way for me to approach this and what I might expect to have to deal with before I make the leap. I want to avoid as many problems as I can and most of what I’ve found whilst searching has been information from several years ago and inevitably things will have changed.

Any guidance would be very much appreciated. I am intending to purchase the DEVONthink Pro licence, if that makes any difference to my transfer.

Q

2

That is correct.

Didn’t you already open a support ticket on this?

3

Hi

Yes, I did and what you said in your reply was:

  • “That’s a decision for you to make, not one controlled or dictated by DEVONthink.”

  • “Groups in DEVONthink are functionally the same as folders in the Finder. You could also see them as the same as Evernote’s notebooks. Again, it’s a matter of your perspective, not anything we mandate.”

  • ”PDF documents in an Evernote note are not embedded, they are linked. The way the data comes through, yes they are separated from the document merely containing links. However, the attachments are stored in a group per note. This is easily tested.”

  • ”I would recommend you don’t concern yourself too much about the “right decision”. DEVONthink doesn’t force any particular way of handing your data on you. And it’s not uncommon for people to make changes to their setup. For example, after using their database for awhile, someone may decide to try using tags. Or they may decide to create a new database and move specific documents into it. There isn’t a correct and incorrect method. It’s what makes sense and is effective for you that matters.”

What I was hoping for from the forum was to learn from anyone who has recently moved from Evernote to DEVONthink so that I might learn from any problems they have experienced.

I did read a thread about a user who had mentioned a script which I think you developed but I’m perhaps not as technically advanced as some users and was just hoping for any pointers to make my transition as smooth as possible.

Thanks,

Q

4

The script / smart rule was to clean up what some see as extraneous groups. However, in your case, with multiple PDFs per note and your desire to keep them together, I didn’t recommend using it in your ticket.