I’ve been pretty fond of Evernote for a while.

I was a very early adopter of OneNote (and loved it too, despite its heavy client ways).  What switched me over to Evernote was a Todo list app called ZenDone with some very cute ideas, among which was deep integration with Evernote.

Almost all the data for a todo item in ZenDone was an Evernote note, and the notebooks themselves were used as GTD lists.

I ultimately left ZenDone because its performance was marginal too often and the company was in denial that I had a problem.

(And the deep integration with Evernote, btw, made it a bear to unwind and export all of the data.)

But the whole experience had gotten me kind of jazzed about Evernote, mainly because it looked pretty nice in almost all the clients and because it had a client for every environment where I either needed to produce or consume notes.  Universal coverage is pretty compelling.

So I simulated the ZenDone integration, first with ToodleDo, then with Todoist, and now with My Life Organized.  Bit of a kludge in all cases, (ZenDone just kind of did the integration for you), but still useful.

And then this morning I lost data on two of my Evernote notes.

They were produced by scanned-in magazine pages vis Scansnap, which produces a kind of embedded pdf within the Evernote note.

I clicked on the button to produce a shared link for the two notes, and the embedded pdf vanished.  Nothing left but the note subject.

I had thrown out the magazine pages once scanned, so there was no going back to them.

I looked on the web and found an idea of a note history.  I was able to roll back the history of both notes to restore the embedded content.  But then, of course, I had to try generating the shared link again, and the one note I tried it on promptly liquidated the content again, and this time I couldn’t get it back.

I had read a fair amount of stuff on the web about how marginal the Evernote software was, and, indeed, I have experienced ceaseless crashes of the clients (and even the web client) on various platforms.

But I had never lost data before.

OK.  Enough.  I had a look at the state of play of OneNote this morning, and I’m going to move over.  The gmail client for OneNote is nothing like as cool as the Evernote one, but there’s good platform coverage and it looks like I can get my work done with no giant gotchas.

Sorry, Evernote.  Maybe another time.