evernote-backup

Backup your notes & notebooks from Evernote locally and export them at any time!

Features

• Quickly sync all your notes into the SQLite database for backup.
• Export all backed up notes in *.enex format, as notebooks or single notes.
• Support for both Evernote and Yinxiang (印象笔记).

Installation

Using portable binary

Download the latest release for your OS.

With Homebrew (Recommended for macOS)

$ brew install evernote-backup

With PIPX (Recommended for Linux & Windows)

$ pipx install evernote-backup

With PIP

$ pip install --user evernote-backup

Python 3.7 or later required.

With Docker

$ docker run --rm -t -v "$PWD":/tmp vzhd1701/evernote-backup:latest

To log in to Evernote using OAuth with Docker, you'll have to forward port 10500 for a callback:

$ docker run --rm -t -v "$PWD":/tmp -p 10500:10500 vzhd1701/evernote-backup:latest init-db --oauth

Usage

Step 1. Database initialization

To start you need to initialize your database.

$ evernote-backup init-db
Username or Email: user@example.com
Password:
Logging in to Evernote...
Enter one-time code: 120917
Authorizing auth token, evernote backend...
Successfully authenticated as user!
Current login will expire at 2022-03-10 10:22:00.
Initializing database en_backup.db...
Reading database en_backup.db...
Successfully initialized database for user!

By default, it will prompt you to enter your account credentials. You can provide them beforehand with --user and --password options.

If you log in to Evernote with Google or Apple accounts, you must use the --oauth option.

To connect to Yinxiang instead of Evernote, use --backend china option. Unfortunately, OAuth is not supported for Yinxiang yet.

Step 2. Downloading Evernote data

Then you will be able to sync your account data.

$ evernote-backup sync
Reading database en_backup.db...
Authorizing auth token, evernote backend...
Successfully authenticated as user!
Current login will expire at 2022-03-10 10:22:00.
Syncing latest changes...
  [####################################]  6763/6763
566 notes to download...
  [####################################]  566/566
Updated or added notebooks: 23
Updated or added notes: 566
Expunged notebooks: 0
Expunged notes: 0
Synchronization completed!

You can interrupt this process at any point. It will continue from where it's left off when you will rerun evernote-backup sync.

evernote-backup keeps track of the sync state and downloads only new changes that have been made since the last run. So every sync will go pretty fast, but you'll have to wait for a bit on the first run if you have a lot of notes in your account. Syncing uses the Evernote Cloud API.

Step 3. Exporting *.enex files

Finally, you can export your data into specified output directory

$ evernote-backup export output_dir/
Reading database en_backup.db...
Exporting notes...
  [####################################]  23/23
All notes have been exported!

By default, evernote-backup will export notes by packing them into notebooks, one *.enex file each. If you want to extract notes as separate files, use the --single-notes flag.

To also include trashed notes in export, use the --include-trash flag.

Exporting is performed wholly offline, and does not require access to the Evernote Cloud API to convert the notes.

That's it! So to export all your Evernote data, you will have to run three commands:

$ evernote-backup init-db
$ evernote-backup sync
$ evernote-backup export output_dir/

After first initialization, you can schedule evernote-backup sync command to keep your local database always up-to-date. However, evernote-backup export will always re-export all notebooks to the specified output directory.

How to refresh expired token

In case your auth token that you initialized your database with expires, you have an option to re-authorize it by running the evernote-backup reauth command. It has the same options as the init-db command.

Getting help

If you found a bug or have a feature request, please open a new issue.

If you have a question about the program or have difficulty using it, you are welcome to the discussions page. You can also mail me directly, I'm always happy to help.

Dependencies

• evernote3 - to access Evernote API
• oauth2 - to perform OAuth authentication
• xmltodict - to convert Evernote internal representation of notes into XML
• click - to create a CLI interface
• click-option-group - to add mutually exclusive options in сlick

Alternative tools

evernote-backup is basically a clone of Evernote's original ENScript but simplified and stripped of its other functions. If you prefer to export your notes using Evernote's original tool, then you will need to take hold of Evernote's legacy client and run the following commands:

ENScript.exe syncDatabase /d backup.ebx /u your@email.com /p your_password
ENScript.exe exportDatabase /d backup.ebx /f output_dir

Further reading

• How to export Notebooks in new Evernote client
• Backing up and restoring Evernote data (Reference article) (requires registration)
• Migrating Your Notes from Evernote to Obsidian
• https://github.com/davidedc/A-thousand-notes

Similar projects

I've also combined a bigger list where I included all adjacent projects that I could find.

Export

Export / Sync