Evernote Support shouted at me

I did something which, in retrospect, was pretty stupid the other day. I was trying to think of ways to improve my Evernote experience which had become somewhat unsatisfactory due to the app’s sluggish performance on my Mac. In true form I decided to use Acrobat to resize all the larger PDFs in my Evernote data folder. My thinking was that smaller PDFs would reduce load times and stuff …

It didn’t really work and my Evernote app just became slower and slower and started to feature the spinning beachball everytime I even thought about using the app. I then submitted a support request to Evernote Support in which I told them what I had done and asked for suggestions. I received the following email last night:

Boy did I feel like more of an ass and suitably rebuked.

Anyway, I apologised profusely and threw myself at their mercy. They came back to me with the following advice to fix my installation:

If you have some important Local Only or unsynced notes, be sure to read the directions at the end of this email to safeguard your information. Otherwise please try the following:

Please try moving your Evernote database directory so that Evernote will regenerate a new local database by copying your notes back down from the service. To do this:

Quit Evernote from the elephant icon in the menu bar.

In the finder, open the “Library” folder in your home directory. (This is in the directory with your name, NOT at the top level of your hard drive.)

Navigate to “Application Support”

Move the “Evernote” folder from that location to a different place (like the desktop)

Start Evernote, provide your username and password again if needed

This will synchronize all of your notes from the service and create a new local database.

*If you do have any Local Only notebooks, right-click the notebook name in the left-hand notebook pane and select “Export”, then export the notebook to .enex format, exporting tags if desired. If you have some unsynchronized notes, you can go to the Note List view, sort by the “Sync” column, and export any notes that have a * in that column to .enex format before following the above instructions. Once those instructions are finished, you can then import the .enex files you created to restore these exported notes.

Lesson learned. I left my MacBook running overnight and downloaded all 3 or 4 GB of data from the Evernote server. The app is a little bit on the slow side but no spinning beachballs.

Oh, in case you are wondering, I have 7 435 notes … I use Evernote every day, for just about everything.