TLDR: Evernote doesn’t seem to backup your work whilst writing. It doesn’t save until you’ve actually exited the note. So it’s highly vulnerable to your phone / tablet dying.
The Story
This afternoon I got my Android Tablet out and started to write up my weekly review. I haven’t actually done my review for the last month, so there was a lot to write in, like how my Baby Boy is developing, issues I’ve had with sudden sciatica in my back and some of the craziness of dealing with the Corona virus reactions and lockdown.
It’s stuff I can re-write, but won’t. I certainly won’t be using Evernote to do so.
Actions
I started by duplicating an existing template I made recently, then I renamed it, sat down for what felt like 45mins and poured words onto the screen.
My tablet is a little old, it’s a Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 and the battery has a habit of dying. Which it did. A notification just appeared to say the battery was at 15% and then suddenly the screen went blank, then it rebooted. I didn’t think too much of it, figuring that my tablet was connected to the Internet and should be both saving locally and to the cloud as I was writing. It was fine if I lost the last minute of work.
But instead I lost probably thousands of words.
If I was writing my Novel I’d be livid. It’s just not acceptable that it’s not automatically backing up. It’s a mobile app, not a desktop app so I shouldn’t need to [Ctrl] + [s] save every few words as I normally do when working. Especially when I’m in the flow and just actively writing I don’t want to think about saving.
Switching to Pure Writer
I’ve been burned, so from now on I think I’ll be doing my initial writing in Pure Writer before copying over to Evernote. I still like Evernotes syncing across devices and the way it works, but I now loathe it doesn’t have an autosave whilst actually writing.
