Moving from Yojimbo to Evernote

I made the decision a couple days ago to move from Yojimbo to Evernote. I’ve been a pretty big user of Yojimbo since the end of 2007, and I have just shy of 500 items in my library. I really haven’t been looking forward to doing this[1].

Last night, I realized that left to my own devices, I’d put this move off forever. My entrenched usage was going to prevent me from ever actually switching. I’d become very comfortable with my everything bucket. The only way to handle this was like a Band-Aid; do it quick and get it over with in one motion.

Unfortunately, I’ve never been good at ripping Band-Aids off, and I treated the move much the same: a painful series of small (and often repeated) motions that only served to increase prolong the discomfort. If you’re thinking about doing this, learn from my mistakes.

Making the Move

Here’s what you’ll need to do to make the move:

  1. Move your Encrypted notes. I moved mine to Secure Notes in 1Password.
  2. Delete your Encrypted notes from Yojimbo.
  3. Buy at least a month of Evernote Premium[2]. The last thing you want is to hit that data transfer limit mid-transfer[3].
  4. After you purchase the upgrade, quit Evernote, then launch it again. Apparently Evernote only pulls your account status on launch.
  5. Optionally, move your serial numbers. Again, I moved to 1Password.
  6. Run this AppleScript.

The script worked great for me, once I made pretty much every mistake I listed above. As always, this is what worked for me, but your experience might be different. I hope that nothing goes wrong for you while making the move, but if it does, I at least hope that different things go wrong.

  1. Partially because I just enjoy Yojimbo. But the lack of cloud sync, and the sporadic release cycle really made me think that Yojimbo just wasn’t getting the love.  ↩

  2. If you have a really big library (more than a gig), you’ll want to break the transfer up into chunks, and spread it over several months. Which sucks. I don’t know of a way around this. Maybe try contacting Evernote support prior to moving.  ↩

  3. For every item you add once you’ve crossed that data transfer threshold, Evernote throws a modal alert. When you click “Ok” on the alert, it opens a webpage trying to sell you Evernote Premium. I had about 120 modal alerts to deal with. Just buy it up front.  ↩

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