Moving from evernote to devonthink in 2020

DEVONthink
22

I just wish sync was as fast as Evernote.

23

If the technologies were comparable perhaps they would be, but theyā€™re not.

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24

I understand the difference. Just something I liked about EN.

As a product, DT is mostly superior.

Now DTTGā€¦ letā€™s see 3.0

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25

Agree about Evernote. Thatā€™s why I moved from it about a year ago. I used Joplin for a while but decided I needed a commercially supported solution. DevonThink meets that.

26

Thanks for the excellent article. As Iā€™m migrating 11k notes from Evernote from 60 Notebooks and 4 Stacks, I have a question.

Would you recommend creating 4 Databases for the 4 Stacks: Project, Area, Resource, Archiveā€¦

Or would you create a Database for each Notebook imported from Evernote?

Thanks.

27

I responded in your new thread.

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28

I had something like 15 or so stacks and used the migration to reconsider my data organization at that level (I kept all my EN notebooks as DT groups). my 15 stacks have become 8 databases and so far the setup works well for me. however my databases seem to be more diverse subject wise than your stacks. e.g. I have a database for my mp3 collection, one for financials, one for ongoing activities (GTD), etc. etc.

key question on what to put into a database for me was if the content is in any way related to other items in that database so that automatic cross references through the DT AI could be meaningfulā€¦

hope that helpsā€¦

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29

Isnā€™t there too much notes in DVT after you moving all Evernotes to DVT? I have a lot of Evernotes Note; very afraid of being puzzled out because of too many notes in DVT. Currently, Iā€™m very cautious of adding new notes in DVT; try to maintain very sanity way because of my Evernote experiences with too many notes.

30

How many notes actually?

31

I have migrated all my 14.000 notes in one flowā€¦the structure pretty much stayed the same (regrouped some EN stacks, but left all EN notebooks intact as DT groups), so if your structure works for you in Evernote, it likely will in Devonthink as well.

Also I have not seen any scaling issues if that is the base of your questionā€¦

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32

And 14,000 notes should be no problem in DEVONthink :slight_smile:

2 Likes
33

I have about 4000 notes.

34

Thatā€™s actually not a huge amount of data for DEVONthink, there are users having hundreds of thousands of items in a database (and few even millions).

35

Though we do suggest a comfortable maximum of 250,000 items per database. :slight_smile:

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36

DEVONthink wonā€™t break a sweat with 4000 notes. I migrated ~12000-ish and it did not feel like I was stressing my 2018 MBP.

Mind you, if your notes contain attachments you will get a DT group per note with the text and the different attachments inside the group. Not exactly an issue, though, but itā€™s kind of strange if you have a mixture of text notes and notes with attachments inside.

Iā€™m very happy with DT after my EN migration, although I feel their webclipper is the best out there when removing extra stuff in the captured clip.

3 Likes
37

This is very useful to read all this about moving from Evernote but I had a question, when I tried moving my Evernote data into Devon think, Devonthink changed the date created of every single file to the same date, the date I did the migration. Thatā€™s of course no good whatsoever because many peopleā€™s searches are of course date based. Any ideas how to stop of fix this problem please.

1 Like
38

A screen capture of the dates youā€™re referring to would be helpful.

39

I have just started using DT and have been evaluating migrating (1) my OneNote notes to DT, and (2) my EverNote notes to DT. I have just concluded that the first is for me feasible and worthwhile, and am now thinking about EN ā†’ DT.

I have figured out how to import EN notes into DT with for-me acceptable formatting. I am now evaluating how well DT can work for me as an EN-replacement for new notes.

I have used EN only for web clipping, and was quite happy to keep my EN notes quite separate from my ON notes. So the key consideration for me in using DT as a new-notes replacement for EN is how well DT works as a replacement web clipper, both on MacOS and on iOS.

Iā€™ve done quite a bit of reading in various sources (these forums, other blogs around the web, the DTTG manual, the Kissel book). Iā€™ve narrowed things down to using either the ā€œWeb Archive clutter-freeā€ or ā€œPDF clutter-freeā€ format as giving me the best balance of (a) readability on both MacOS and iOS, (b) clippability from both MacOS and iOS, (c) preserving enough images to meet my needs, and (d) keeping the clipped note/item size manageable. The web archive clutter-free format is seeming to work better (better readability of text ā€“ PDFs seems to make the text very small, requiring zooming in to read).

But I do have a few questions:

  1. Do people have thoughts about the clutter-free web archive format? Iā€™ve seen most recommendations for web clip format to be PDF, and against web archive. But for me, web archive seems to give better readability, so I am leaning towards it. Any critical reasons why I should not?

  2. When making a web clip on iOS (using the DTTG share extension in Safari) is there a way to specifiy not only the target Database, but also a target subgroup within the Database? As far as I can tell, this isnā€™t possible, but I wanted to be sure Iā€™m not missing something.

  3. As far as I can tell, a clip made on iOS (Safari ā†’ Share ā†’ DTTG extension) does not sync to MacOS unless I open DTTG on iOS. I did read the DTTG manual, and I have DTTG set to Automatic Sync, with background refresh on. But I waited 20 minutes, and a clip I made on iOS did not show up on MacOS. I am assuming that the 30-second automatic sync window is not an issue, as the clip size was less than 1 MB. Anything I can do differently to get automatic sync from DTTG?

TIA!

40

2. No this is not possible currently.
3. Neither DEVONthink To Go not DEVONthink will not sync if theyā€™re not open.

41

@BLUEFROG ā€“ many thanks for this information.

wrt my third question, I realize I should ask a different question, in case my previous wording was inaccurate:

I now realize that I am unsure whether ā€œopenā€ on iOS means ā€œthe currently-in-use appā€ or merely ā€œhas been opened, but is in the background while another app is being usedā€. I was using ā€œopenā€ to mean the latter. Are you using ā€œopenā€ to refer to ā€œthe currently-in-use appā€?

In any case, I interpreted the following, from p. 50 of the DTTG 3.1 manual, as implying that sync is possible even in the ā€œhas been opened, but is in the background while another app is being usedā€ case. Is that not correct?

Schedule: Choose if DEVONthink To Go
should synchronize automatically or just on
demand. Pull down in any database or item
list to start the synchronization at any time.
DEVONthink To Go will also sync when you
switch away from it to another app if you
choose to synchronize automatically.
If you choose to synchronize automatically
iOS will also wake up DEVONthink To Go
from time to time and let it sync. As the
time for the background refresh is limited
to 30 seconds not all databases might get
synchronized at a time. You can check when
the last background refresh happened in the
Help popover.

Any additional info about this would be much appreciated ā€“ thanks!