Evernote’s recent decision to change prices and limit device syncing accompanied by crippling even the paid (plus) service has made me rethink our relationship and I’m sad to say it’s over. Instead of syncing my notes and other things to Evernote, I`m going to send stuff to Google Drive – and it’s pretty easy to do.
With the ever evolving capabilities of cheaper and in often cases, free products I don’t see any reason to stay with Evernote. In fact as an advocate for all things Google, I’ve felt slightly dirty for being with Evernote for so long when Google Drive is a perfectly viable alternative to what’s on offer with Evernote in terms of functionality. What Google Drive can’t offer me directly, guess what? Google Keep has you covered, in fact in some instances Keep is a better option for me and instead of paying an extra US$20 per year to maintain what I already had, I’m saving US$29.99 by moving to a free option that is included with my Google account.
Goodbye Evernote…
It was great while it lasted!
So, with the wallet sting and my hesitance as to the long term viability of their business I decided to transfer my workflow to Google Drive and Google Keep as a pair.
Moving the workflow really wasn’t an issue at all, I stopped using Evernote as a primary and started using Drive (Docs and Sheets mainly) for my writing and documents, Keep for my quick notes & lists, and stick with Todoist (which I already use heavily) for tasks. But what really worried me was the nearly 4000 notes in Evernote that I really didn’t want to be separated from my current workflow so I went looking for options and found a really simple, easy and free** (nb. Free trial, long term the account setup will not be free) way to migrate all of my notes from Evernote to Google Drive and it’s from a company called Cloud HQ.
The process is very simple once you sign up for a free trial, you merely need to link your Google and Evernote accounts and allow Cloud HQ access to both, then sync them. Now this is going to take a while, if (like me) you have literally thousands of notes in your Evernote account. To be exact, the estimate on sync time is a bit over 2 days for that volume of notes.
There are some settings that you can tweak to make the migration as easy for yourself as you like. I chose to migrate all of my notes into a single folder in Drive so that I can sort and place them where I want to at a later time. I also made the choice to format all migrated notes as Google Docs rather than some of the quicker options, but that was to make the functionality inside Docs full for functionality.
Depending on the size of the resultant transfer of notes from Evernote to Drive actually is, you may find your existing 15GB of Google Drive space isn’t quite enough. You can of course pay for extra storage, or invest some time and leg work into getting to level 4 as a Local Guide and activate a free upgrade to 1TB of Google Drive storage.
The move from Evernote to Google Drive has not only made me look at my storage, but also about my workflow and how it could be improved. It’s a lesson that I’ve learnt from and just because what you have is easy, doesn’t mean something better could be there already and staring you in the face.
Editor Note:
This is not a sponsored piece of content, there are other services to transfer your data, feel free to list them below and what experiences you’ve had with them.
If you’re an Evernote user, will you be switching away after their price hike?
