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 uv (Recommended for Linux & Windows)

$ uv tool install evernote-backup

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

From source (with uv)

$ uv tool install https://github.com/vzhd1701/evernote-backup.git

From source (for local development)

This project uses uv for dependency management and packaging. You will have to install it first. See uv official documentation for instructions.

$ git clone https://github.com/vzhd1701/evernote-backup.git
$ cd evernote-backup/
$ uv sync --all-groups
$ uv run evernote-backup

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!

If you log in to Evernote, OAuth is used. You can select the login method with --oauth-method:

• desktop (default) — Uses the same workflow as the Evernote Desktop Client. After you authorize in the browser, cancel the redirect when the site asks to open the OAuth link and instead copy and paste that URL ("Return to Evernote") into the evernote-backup terminal window. Limitation: the Evernote free plan allows only one active session at a time, so this may sign you out of an existing desktop or mobile client session or later ask you to disconnect this client.

• import — Imports an OAuth session from an existing Evernote Desktop Client installation. This lets you run the Desktop Client in parallel with evernote-backup. It works as long as the Desktop Client stays logged in; if you log out there, the refresh token is invalidated. Supported on Windows and macOS.

• mcp — Uses the Evernote MCP interface API. Available only on paid Evernote plans. Untested. Starts a local callback listener; for headless or remote sessions, paste the full http://.../oauth_callback?code=... URL from the redirect into the terminal.

Example:

$ evernote-backup init-db --oauth-method import

To connect to Yinxiang instead of Evernote, use the --backend china option. It will prompt you to enter your account credentials. You can provide them beforehand with --user and --password. OAuth is not supported for Yinxiang.

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.

Tasks, reminders, single-note shares

If during sync you see a warning that tasks, reminders and single-note shares will not be synced, your database has a legacy auth token. To fix it, run:

$ evernote-backup reauth

(or reauth --oauth-method import to reuse a logged-in Desktop Client session, see Step 1 for explanation) and then run sync again.

Skipping broken notes (blacklist)

Sometimes Evernote still lists a note or notebook during sync, but the note body cannot be downloaded (Failed to download note). You can permanently skip those GUIDs so sync no longer retries them on every run.

GUIDs must be full Evernote UUIDs, for example 01234567-89ab-cdef-0123-456789abcdef (case-insensitive).

# List current blacklist
$ evernote-backup manage blacklist

# Skip a broken note
$ evernote-backup manage blacklist --add-note-id 01234567-89ab-cdef-0123-456789abcdef

# Skip all notes from a broken notebook
$ evernote-backup manage blacklist --add-notebook-id 11234567-89ab-cdef-0123-456789abcdef

# Remove from blacklist (will be retried on next sync)
$ evernote-backup manage blacklist --del-note-id 01234567-89ab-cdef-0123-456789abcdef

# Clear all blacklisted notes or notebooks
$ evernote-backup manage blacklist --reset-notes
$ evernote-backup manage blacklist --reset-notebooks

Each --add-* / --del-* option can be repeated to pass multiple GUIDs. Notes stay scheduled in the database; only the download step is skipped. Removing a GUID from the blacklist lets the next sync try downloading it again.

SSL Errors

If you get any SSL errors, please run evernote-backup -v manage ping to check your connection to Evernote server and get full information about the SSL environment.

You can also try using --use-system-ssl-ca flag to make evernote-backup use system Certificate Authority (CA) storage instead of the bundled one.

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.

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

Project	Description	Language
ExportAllEverNote	Export notes in ENEX format driectly from your account	Python
evernote2	Improved version of standard Evernote SDK. Also provides a tool for exporting notes driectly from your account	Python
evernote-to-sqlite	Converts ENEX files into SQLite database	Python
enote	Utility that can backup Evernote notes and notebooks	Python
evernote-exporter	Export notes from old Evernote local database .exb format	Python

Export / Sync

Project	Description	Language
SyncToGit	Syncs your notes with their resources to the git repository in HTML format	Python
evermark	A command line tool for syncing markdown notes to Evernote	JavaScript
eversync	Sync your local directories with evernote notebooks	Python
EverMark	A tool that can sync local markdown/text notes to Evernote	Python
LocalEvernote	Syncs local directory containing notes in Markdown format with Evernote	Python
gnsync	Part of Geeknote	Python