So you’ve deleted an Evernote notebook
I was able to recover my lost notebook. Here’s how I did it.
I love Evernote. It has become as second brain for me, recording and indexing all the pieces of data I would normally have scattered in paper or across my hard drive.
I was tidying up my Evernote database recently — consolidating my plethora of notebooks. After moving notes out of a defunct notebook, I deleted the notebook. I was doing this on my phone.
Each time you click or tap delete an Evernote notebook, you get an important warning. Here’s what they look like on iOS and MacOS, respectively, though similar warnings show up on the Windows, Android, or web versions.
I was deleting so quickly that I just blew right past this warning, blithely tapping Delete. Evernote is set up to automatically sync, so it immediately deleted the online versions of all my notes in this notebook. Receipts notebook is where I’ve saved years worth of receipts for online and offline purchases. I had to get these back.
Evernote weren’t kidding about “this operation cannot be undone”. Several hours of Googling and searching my computer and the web version of Evernote, as well as Evernote’s extensive help files and help forum, convinced me those notes were gone from my computer and from the online synced version of my notes.
Fortunately I keep backups of my computer. No problem, right? So I went into my Time Machine backup using the method I’ll explain shortly, and recovered the Evernote database. Unfortunately, when you sync Evernote with an older version of the database, it helpfully re-deletes the destroyed notes because your recovered database is older than the online deleted version. So we need to modify our approach.
The steps below show how I recovered my lost notebook. This approach works for individual notes you’ve deleted as well (if they’ve been purged from the trash notebook already).
Note: This approach requires you to have a backup of your computer somewhere. I had it in a Time Machine backup and also in a Carbon Copy Cloner backup.
It doesn’t matter where the backup is, so long as you can access the file system in the backup to extract the necessary files from a time BEFORE you deleted the notebook you want to recover. If you don’t have any backups I think you’re out of luck. Take this as a life lesson and start a backup regime today.
- Sync Evernote to ensure your notes stay as they are. Wait for syncing to finish before you proceed.
- (Mac) — Click Evernote > About Evernote in the menu bar. You will see the Evernote Logo, the name “Evernote” and a list of credits. Hold down the option key and a link “Open Database Folder” appears just under the version number. Click this link to open the folder holding your Evernote database in Finder.
(Windows)- In the menu bar, click Tools > Options. Under General, near the bottom of the window, click the “Open Database folder” link. This opens the folder holding your Evernote database in Windows Explorer.
3. (IMPORTANT) — shut down Evernote. (Mac) press Command-Q while Evernote is selected. On Windows, close the Evernote window and then right click on the Evernote icon in the system tray and click “Quit Evernote”. We will be changing the database which you don’t want to do while Evernote is running.
4. Rename the files and folders in the location you opened in step 2. I simply moved them into a new folder called “original”. This retains our existing database to restore later.
5. Choose a backup from before you made your accidental notebook or note deletions. In your backups, go to the same folder location you opened in step 2. Copy all the folders and files from this backup back to the same spot on your computer.
6. IMPORTANT — disconnect from the internet. We don’t want Evernote to sync away our deleted notes before we recover them!
7. Reopen Evernote. You should now see your deleted notes.
8. We now need to put our previously-deleted notes in a safe place. If we don’t, Evernote sync will simply delete them again when we reconnect to the internet. Selecting the notes you want to recover, click (Mac) File > Export Notes… or (Windows) File > Export. Choose .enex format and save the files to your desktop or another safe location.
9. Shut down Evernote again, using same approach as in step 3.
10. Go back to the database location on your local drive (see step 2). Delete the files and folders you transferred across from your backup in step 5, and put the original files and folders (from step 4) back where they were originally.
11. Reconnect to the internet and restart Evernote. Sync again to ensure everything is working properly. This may take some time.
12. Reimport the notes you exported in step 8. (Mac) Click File > Import Notes… or (Windows) File > Import > Evernote Export Files… Evernote will import your notes back into Evernote. Move these notes to wherever you want them to end up.
13. You may now sync again to lock in your formerly-deleted notes back into your database.
That’s it. Now you know what a pain this is, BE CAREFUL when deleting notebooks or notes. Better to not have to go through all this again.
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