How to export everything out of Evernote

Exporting from Evernote is not hard. Exporting from Evernote and being able to prove you got everything is a different job, and it is the one that matters if you are leaving.

Export from the desktop app, not the web

The full export lives in the Mac and Windows desktop apps. The web client has never been the right tool for this, so install the desktop app and let it finish syncing before you start. An export can only contain what has actually reached the machine you are exporting from.

Wait for the sync indicator to go quiet. If you export mid-sync you get a partial library and no warning that it was partial.

Select every note, then export as ENEX

Open a notebook, select all the notes in it, and choose the export option from the context menu. Evernote writes a single .enex file. The menu labels have moved around across versions, so look for Export Notes or Export in the right-click menu on the selection.

Do it one notebook at a time and name each file after its notebook. It is more clicking, but it gives you a manifest you can count against later, and it keeps any single file from getting large enough to choke the importer on the other end.

What ENEX actually contains

ENEX is XML. Each note carries its title, its content as ENML, its created and updated timestamps, its tags, and its attachments encoded inline as base64 with an MD5 hash for each one. That hash is the useful part, and almost nothing that reads ENEX bothers to check it.

What ENEX does not carry: the notebook name itself, which is why exporting per notebook matters, your saved searches, your shared notebook permissions, and note history. Reminders and internal note links survive unevenly.

The archive you built by hand is the first thing to vanish

Almost everyone leaving Evernote is carrying an improvised archive. A notebook called Old, or 2019, or Done, or a whole stack of them, because there was never an archive button and a notebook was the only place a finished note could go.

That structure is exactly what the export drops. The notebook name is not in the file, and a stack is a grouping of notebooks, so it is not in the file either. Export the account in one pass and years of deciding what was live and what was finished arrive on the other side as one undifferentiated pile.

Exporting one notebook at a time is what saves it. That is the same advice as above for a different reason: the file name ends up being the only surviving record that this notebook was your archive and that one was current work.

Then use it on the way in. Decide which of those notebooks were an archive rather than a subject, and if the app you are moving to has a real archive, put them there. Do not spend your first hour rebuilding a filing system you only invented to work around a missing feature.

Check the export before you trust it

Two counts and one spot check. Count the notes Evernote says are in each notebook, then count the notes in the .enex file. On a Mac, this counts them without opening anything:

grep -c '<note>' MyNotebook.enex

Then open the largest file you can remember attaching and confirm it opens. Attachments are where exports fail, and they fail silently.

Keep the ENEX after you migrate

Whatever you import into, keep the original .enex files somewhere boring and backed up. They are your receipt. If the destination turns out to have mangled something six months later, the export is the only copy that proves what the original looked like.

Importing on the other side

Most note apps read ENEX. Fewer of them verify what they wrote. When you import, look for a report that counts what arrived, and be suspicious of an importer that finishes silently and tells you nothing.

Egg checks every attachment against its hash after upload and stops on the first file it cannot prove is identical, then names it. That is the behaviour to look for, whether or not the app you pick is mine.

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