I have more than 8,000 notes so this takes a little while. When I run the script, it selects all of the notes that meet the criteria and then exports them. In my code, I’ve export mine to an external drive that is backed up by my cloud backup service. You’ll also want to update line 5 with the path on your machine that you want the export file to reside.

If you’ve created notes and dated them prior to 1990, you’ll want to change line 10 of the script to reflect the appropriate date. I chose that date because it will backup any notes after that date. It selects all notes after January 1, 1990, and exports them to an ENEX file on a specified path. I work primarily on a Mac, and so I wrote an AppleScript to take advantage of Evernote’s AppleScript interface to automate the process of backing up my Evernote data. Having a backup of my notes provides some measure of protection against those screw-up, and that is the main reason that I back up my Evernote data. But I’ve worked with technology (and been a professional in the IT field) long enough to know that I am eventually bound to screw up. That might seem extreme, and perhaps it is. Once that happens, and Evernote syncs with the server, the notes are unrecoverable. Perhaps, after working hard many days, with little sleep, I accidentally drag an important notebook to the trash, and then purge the trash before I realized what happened. I know that at some point in time, I am bound to so something unintentionally destructive. In truth, what I am preparing for is my inevitable screw up. Being prepared for the unexpected is something that I picked up back in my flying days, when all kinds of little problems might crop up, and being able to decide whether or not they were serious was important. Why I backup my Evernote dataīacking up data–even data in the cloud that is generally readily accessible–acts as a kind of insurance policy. It may seem kind of silly to back up notes that are already stored in the cloud, but I have what I think is one really good reasons for backing up my data. That file, in turn, gets backup by my cloud backup service, CrashPlan. Once a month, export all of my Evernote data to an ENEX file, which sits on an external disk. I’m actually writing this post from the bar in my hotel and it is last night, after a roughly 15 hour day of work.

Export evernote files to external drive