The darker side of relying on Evernote

I live in Evernote and usually it’s in the county of Brightsiding, Idyllicshire but it has problems. Most of the time I just wish it were a tiny bit faster. But sometimes it goes wrong and when it does, it feels like a betrayal because you have come to trust this software and service so very much.

With me, it was an audio recording that began syncing copies of itself. I stopped counting when it had exceeded 120 identical copies across all the versions of Evernote that I use (iPad, iPhone and Mac). You can guess how irritating it was to have to wade through those, you can guess how infuriating it was to painstakingly delete all-but-one and then have another dozen appear a moment later. But add this to your irritation: it was an audio file so it was bigger than just a little jotted-down note. Those 120+ copies ate through the limit of how much data you can upload in a month. I complained and Evernote gave me an extra allowance – which that same bleedin’ note immediately ate up. I complained again and this time they gave me the allowance plus a kind of workaround to protect the note and stop the duplication.

It did work, but I had to use the same fudge again a few weeks later. It’s happened since and this time I just though bollocks to this and deleted the note entirely. Let it go.

But it does seem that audio may be a problem for Evernote as there is this one fella who has this week come out against the software’s problems and details how it went wrong with his audio – and how Evernote the company failed to deal with his issue. That sounds petulant when I summarise it in a thrice but the (quite long) post is written with patience and with so much angst that it is instead reasonable and even thoughtful about the situation.

And it does have a happyish ending:

Update: Evernote CEO Phil Libin contacted me and we spoke about the issues described. He apologized, saying the post rings true and that there is a lot of work to be done both on the application and service fronts. In the short-term the company will be implementing fixes for the issues above, with plans to focus on general quality improvements in the months ahead.

Read the full story and see whether this explains any problems you’ve been having with Evernote over at Jason Kincaid’s blog.

Via Lifehacker

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