A Rant about “The Cloud” - Loss of Data & Trust in Evernote

That’s right folks, real live honest a goodness lost data in the cloud - what a scary thought, not to mention a time consuming pain in the backside.

So I love relying on the “cloud” for storing my data, it’s great, always there, whenever I need it, where ever I am; if only… Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had this “sinking feeling” that sometimes my notes were not being updated properly on Evernote; but with three devices, and a scatterbrain mindset I couldn’t be 100% sure. This is why I take notes - lots of them.

Thus suspecting that sometimes Evernote was occasionally fuggling up my notes; when I got done editing a note last night using the windows application, I entered the text “eof 4/3 (and maybe a time)” at the end of the note I had edited. Then, just to be sure, I loaded the note on my android tablet to see that the change had made it over; it had. This next morning, I went to edit and read my note on my android tablet  which I had been working on, and I noticed a bunch of text which I had removed the previous night was back, and my little eof note at the bottom of the file was GONE - yup, you heard it right; and along with the little note, also gone was my changes, and a little bit of my sanity.

Now this is an issue I was able to almost reproduce, but it really makes me wary of Evernote now, plus the new installation of doubt concerning storing data in the cloud. It’s actually rather frightening to wonder how many other bits & bytes which might also have been lost over the past who knows how many days/weeks/months - and has gone unnoticed. 

I appreciate that Evernote offers a free service, and a somewhat costly (in my opinion) premium service (which as I understand I would be able to help myself with this problem if I had it). But if it cannot handle data integrity properly…then I, nor anyone else should have use of it. I mean really; what would the point be? A product or service such as you offer should not run under a “it works for most” nomenclature. Especially when it comes to data which is constantly being updated.

It really saddens me to have to part ways with Evernote - I found it to be an awesome tool - with a lot of untapped potential.

Worse than that though, is how it is now making me totally rethink what I store in the cloud, and how maybe it all needs to be re-thought with provisions of 0% chance of lost data.

(photo via Stock.xChng - link)