I Moved 1,640 Notes Out of Evernote After 7 Years — Here's What Actually Worked

After seven years and 1,640 notes, I finally left Evernote.

Not because I wanted to. Because staying stopped making sense: the free plan had shrunk to 50 notes and one device, the paid plan crept up to ~$100/year, and search — the one feature that kept me paying — got slower every year. Meanwhile Google Drive gave me 15GB free, search with OCR that reads text inside my scanned documents, and an AI assistant that can actually do things with my files.

The decision took five minutes. Getting my data out took three weekends. This is what I learned, so yours takes one afternoon.

The official export is quietly broken

Evernote’s official answer is ENEX export. Here’s what they don’t tell you:

• You can only export 100 notes at a time from the desktop app. 1,640 notes = 17 rounds of clicking.
• On large notebooks, exports fail silently. The file says “done,” but notes are missing — and nothing tells you which ones.
• ENEX is an XML format that almost nothing else can read properly. Import it anywhere and your tables collapse, checklists become plain text, and attachments scatter.

I found the missing-notes problem only because I was paranoid enough to count. If you take one thing from this article: count your notes before and after any export. The number in Evernote’s sidebar is your ground truth.

The export that actually works: HTML

Buried under the ENEX option is “Export as HTML.” It gets none of the attention and all of the reliability:

• No 100-note ceiling — I exported everything in one pass
• Every note becomes a folder with its HTML file and attachments together
• Formatting survives: tables, checklists, embedded images

The catch: what you get is a pile of HTML files. You can archive them, but you can’t live in them. No editing on your phone, no full-text search worth using. Which brings us to the real problem.

Getting 1,640 notes into Google Drive

Uploading the files is easy. Uploading them usefully is not. I wanted:

1. My notebook structure preserved as folders
2. Notes converted to editable Google Docs — not dead HTML blobs
3. Attachments (PDFs, images, audio memos) kept next to their notes
4. The ability to resume if my Wi-Fi died at note 900

I tried the existing options first. cloudHQ syncs your notes across — as raw HTML files, for $49/month. MultCloud moves files but doesn’t convert anything. Manual conversion through Google Docs’ importer works… one note at a time. At roughly a minute per note, 1,640 notes is 27 hours of clicking.

So I did the unreasonable thing: I built my own migration tool.

What I had to solve along the way

A few problems turned out to be genuinely hard, and they’re worth knowing about even if you go a different route:

Audio memos have no file extension. Evernote strips extensions from audio attachments. Uploaded as-is, they’re unplayable mystery files. The fix was reading each file’s magic bytes to detect the real format (.m4a, .mp3, .wav) and restoring the extension automatically.

Memory explodes on bulk parsing. Parse a few hundred notebooks naively and attachments pile up in RAM — one of my users hit 112GB of memory usage before I fixed it. Stream to disk, release as you go.

Notes with no text still matter. Hundreds of my notes were just a photo or a PDF with no body text. Those shouldn’t become empty Google Docs — they should upload as bare attachments in the right folder.

Everything must be resumable. Real migrations get interrupted. The tool tracks every uploaded note, so restarting skips what’s done and continues from the break.

The result: my 1,640 notes moved in about 25 minutes. Notebooks became folders, notes became real Google Docs with tables and checklists intact, and every attachment landed where it belonged.

What I’d tell you to do

1. Count your notes. Sidebar number, write it down.
2. Export as HTML, not ENEX. One pass, everything included.
3. Verify the count of exported note folders against step 1.
4. Pick your destination format consciously: if you just want an archive, upload the HTML and stop. If you want notes you can actually edit and search, you need conversion to Google Docs.
5. Spot-check after migrating — open ten random notes, especially ones with tables and attachments.

The tool, if you want it

I turned my scripts into a proper macOS app: Evernote Migration Tool. It does the HTML-first migration described above — Google Docs conversion, notebook structure, attachment handling, audio extension repair, resume support. The free version migrates 20 notes so you can check the output quality with your own data before paying anything. One-time $19.99, no subscription — it’s a migration, not a lifestyle.

→ Evernote Migration Tool on Gumroad

If you’re doing this manually instead, the checklist above will get you 90% of the way. Either way: get your notes somewhere that treats them like yours.

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Questions about a weird edge case in your export? Leave a comment — after 1,640 notes and a few hundred support emails, I’ve probably seen it.