Evernote is one of the apps that shape my day. Keeping notes is easy and fast, categorizing and finding what you need is a no brainer. In sum, I love Evernote.

But I had quite a hiccup with it in February. Long story short, an important note of mine disappeared. Irrecoverably. So now every time I use Evernote I ask myself if my data is actually safe.

It all started one day in February when my Mac asked me to update some apps. One of them was Evernote. It is not something unusual so I said yes as usual.

The update started and Evernote crashed. After the update reopened and I could use it again.

Murphy´s Law

An hour later I was looking for an important business TODO note that I update daily. It was THE NOTE from all of my notes. Surprisingly was not appearing any more and I could find a version from December only. After some searching I had to revert to the support line.

Support Fiasco

What I was not suspecting at this time is that my support experience will take quite some time. After sending several support requests and getting no answer. I ended up in some kind of support forums where I got an answer almost immediately but it was not an answer that can solve my problem. After several days of waiting and re-sending my case I finally read that paid clients get better support. So I joined Evernote Premium.

This is where I felt – ok, I was not paying so obviously cannot expect special treatment. Yet, solving a technical issue and specifically data loss should not be something limited to paid membership. In the end Evernote is all about data and there is an established belief that your data is safe in the cloud.

Now that I was a paid member, I had the pleasure to talk to a human being and actually very amiable person by the name of Ben.

Data is Gone. With the Wind

In a matter of several days Ben walked me through all hidden places of the system, asked me to check logs, visit the web version, change settings. But in the end had to admit that my note was gone. Irrecoverably. Ouch, that hurt.

Apparently the note had no ID inside the Evernote cloud and once the app crashed and restarted the note was deleted.

As said, I love Evernote but this incident shook my flawless perception of the product. They lost my business planning from last months plus tasks for next several months. I eventually recovered stuff from here and there but there was serious damage caused.

In my humble opinion number 1 priority of a cloud company is to ensure its users data is safely and securely stored. All the rest of improvements and gimmicks I am getting for years are rarely having any impact on my usage or speeding up my work. I still don’t get it how is it possible to have such a problem in a mature and established product but shit happens.

End of Story

Ben gave me 6 months free Premium membership. I did not get use of it. Still using Evernote though.

Which alternative products do you use? And is there a good alternative to Evernote?