Mainichi Shinbun, one of the leading papers in Japan, reported that Evernote Corporation has lost its 7000 users' data due to system errors.(Google translation of the article)
According to the paper, the California based company which provides storage services on the Internet, suffered system errors from July 1-4, 2010 which caused data losses for some 7000 users. The company sent a letter signed by Mr. Dave Engberg, its CTO, to those users explaining the situation and offered to upgrade their contracts to the premium services at no charge.
A Japanese blog reported the incident and reprinted the the letter he received from Mr. Engberg which read as follows:
Another blog reported the same letter, and several users reported to us they indeed lost some data.
I have sent the following message to Evernote via their site's Contact Us page.
If I get any reply from Evernote, I'll post it here.
Evernote posted a official explanation of the problem on its web site.
Evernote’s July 1st Server Problem « Evernote Blogcast
As for the reason why they haven't made a wide announcement, they say the following:
All right, it's understandable, but are the support staff still busy working with the affected users? It's been a month since the outage.
The statement also says:
Hollow, are you talking to me?
If it hadn't been for the erroneous information, has Evernote swept the issue under the rug?
Cnet also covered this issue and found out that of 6,323 users affected by the outage, approximately 70 percent were able to get their data back. That means nearly 2000 users lost their data.
Evernote Japan contacted me. They said that by "70 percent were able to get their data back," Evernote CEO Phil Libin meant he knew for sure they've got their data back. He didn't mean that the remaining 30 percent of the users lost their data. He just doesn't know for sure if they were able to fully recover their data. However, from the overall positive responses they received from the 30 percent of the users, Evernote people think it is safe to assume that almost all the users recoverd their data successfully.
According to the paper, the California based company which provides storage services on the Internet, suffered system errors from July 1-4, 2010 which caused data losses for some 7000 users. The company sent a letter signed by Mr. Dave Engberg, its CTO, to those users explaining the situation and offered to upgrade their contracts to the premium services at no charge.
A Japanese blog reported the incident and reprinted the the letter he received from Mr. Engberg which read as follows:
We're writing to tell you about a potential problem which may have occurred with your Evernote account a few days ago. One of our servers suffered a series of serious hardware failures over the Fourth of July weekend. Our automatic redundancy and backup systems recovered the vast majority of the data and most users did not experience any problems.
Unfortunately, the servers may have failed to properly record new notes and edits made by a small group of users (less than one fifth of one percent) between July 1 and July 4. Your account is in the group potentially affected. We're writing to suggest that you attempt to recover or recreate any important notes that may be missing from that time using the information stored on your Evernote desktop application. Please see the instructions for each client, below.
Alternatively, if you created notes during those dates via Evernote's incoming email gateway, you may be able to find the emails in your mail client's "sent mail" folder, and you could send them into Evernote again. If you created notes by clipping from the web, you may be able to find those pages again from your browser's history to clip the pages again. If you created file attachments or PDFs, you may be able to find the original files and add them again.
This was an isolated, one-time occurrence so any notes from before July 1st or after July 4th will not be affected. We have revised our management, backup, and monitoring systems to prevent this type error in the future. We apologize for our mistake and for your inconvenience (even if you didn't lose any notes, you still had to read this email).
As a further apology, we have upgraded your account to Evernote Premium for one year. In addition to a much higher monthly quota and some powerful new features, a Premium account will ensure that you get priority tech support should you have any lingering problems or questions from this disruption. If you were already a Premium subscriber - thanks! - we have extended your subscription by an additional year at no charge.
Thank you for finding us and for using Evernote. We are committed to constantly improving our product and providing you with the best possible experience now and in the future. Please do not hesitate to contact me directly if you want any additional information about this error, need help with the recovery procedures below, or just have ideas about how we can make Evernote more useful for you.
Sincerely,
David Engberg
Chief Technology Officer
Evernote Corporation
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* If you have installed Evernote for Windows: *
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1) Start Evernote on your Windows computer and press the Sync button.
2) Click on the "All Notes" button to view all of your notes.
3) Find all of the notes that were created between July 1st at 6:45am GMT and July 5th at 10:45am GMT. You can do this by sorting your list by the Date Created, or by copying the following line and then pasting it into the "Search" field in Evernote:
created:20100701T064500Z -created:20100705T104500Z
If you see any notes created during this time, then please continue, otherwise you can stop.
4) Select all of the notes that were created during this time by clicking on the first note and then holding the Shift key while you click on the last note to select them all.
5) Go to: File > Export...
Save the .enex archive file to a place on your computer.
6) If you have created any "Local" notebooks on your computer that you didn't want to synchronize to Evernote, then right-click on each of these in your list of Notebooks on the left side and use "Export Notes..." to export each of these to other .enex archive files on your computer.
7) Go to: Tools > Sign Out
8) Go to: Evernote > Options...
9) Click on: Open Database Folder...
10) Move the file with your username (ending in ".exb") to a different location on your computer. For example, move it to your computer's desktop.
11) Sign in to Evernote with your username and password. If you see a prompt to "transfer database", click "No".
12) Wait for your account to synchronize
13) Go to: File > Import > Evernote Export Files...
14) Import each of the .enex archive files that you Exported in steps 5 and 6
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* If you have installed Evernote for Mac OS X: *
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1) Start Evernote on your Mac and press the Sync button
2) Click on the "All Notes" button to view all of your notes
3) Find all of the notes that were created between July 1st at 6:45am GMT and July 5th at 10:45am GMT. You can do this by sorting your list by the Date Created, or by copying the following line and then pasting it into the "Search" field in Evernote:
created:20100701T064500Z -created:20100705T104500Z
If you see any notes created during this time, then please continue, otherwise you can stop.
4) Select all of the notes that were created during this time by clicking on the first note and then holding the Shift key while you click on the last note to select them all.
5) Go to: File > Export...
Save the .enex archive file to a place on your computer.
6) If you have created any "Local" notebooks on your computer that you didn't want to synchronize to Evernote, then Control-Click (or Right-Click) on each of these in the list of Notebooks on the left side and use "Export Notes..." to export each of these to other .enex archive files on your computer.
7) Click on the elephant icon in the menu bar and select "Quit" from the menu.
8) In the finder, open the "Library" folder in your home directory. (This is in the directory with your name, NOT at the top level of your hard drive.)
9) Open the "Application Support" folder
10) Move the "Evernote" folder from that location a different place (like your desktop).
11) Start Evernote, and sign in with your username and password if needed.
12) Wait for your account to synchronize
13) Go to: File > Import...
14) Import each of the .enex archive files that you Exported in steps 5 and 6
Another blog reported the same letter, and several users reported to us they indeed lost some data.
I have sent the following message to Evernote via their site's Contact Us page.
Minichi Shinbun, one of the leading paper in Japan, reported that Evernote has lost data of about 7000 people in early July. Is this correct?
http://mainichi.jp/select/biz/it/news/20100809mog00m020003000c.html?link_id=RSH03
Some blogs in Japan claimed they received email from David Engberg, CEO of Evernote Corporation. http://bizbigg.blog129.fc2.com/blog-entry-7.html
http://totonoblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/evernote.html
Please let me know why you have not made any announcement if this is what really happened.
If I get any reply from Evernote, I'll post it here.
update
Evernote posted a official explanation of the problem on its web site.
Evernote’s July 1st Server Problem « Evernote Blogcast
As for the reason why they haven't made a wide announcement, they say the following:
Less than one fifth of one percent of our users were in the potentially affected group and we were able to identify 100% of them from the server logs. Because of this, we decided not to post a wider announcement to give our support staff the time to work with the actual people affected instead of fielding a flood of requests from the more than 99% of users who were not in the affected group but had no way of determining that themselves.
All right, it's understandable, but are the support staff still busy working with the affected users? It's been a month since the outage.
The statement also says:
We are posting this now because of erroneous information that we’ve seen popping up on the web.
Hollow, are you talking to me?
If it hadn't been for the erroneous information, has Evernote swept the issue under the rug?
Cnet also covered this issue and found out that of 6,323 users affected by the outage, approximately 70 percent were able to get their data back. That means nearly 2000 users lost their data.
update 2
Evernote Japan contacted me. They said that by "70 percent were able to get their data back," Evernote CEO Phil Libin meant he knew for sure they've got their data back. He didn't mean that the remaining 30 percent of the users lost their data. He just doesn't know for sure if they were able to fully recover their data. However, from the overall positive responses they received from the 30 percent of the users, Evernote people think it is safe to assume that almost all the users recoverd their data successfully.
