Using Evernote and Dropbox

Back in March, on the sixth episode of the 512 Podcast, I spoke with Myke about my moving to Evernote for notes and “resources” management.

Now, for the most part, I like Evernote. It runs well, is on every device I own, and syncs flawlessly. That said, the fact that it stores everything in HTML does make me hesitate, but HTML is a lot easier to deal with upon export than some truly propriety system or language.

I also love Dropbox. Like Evernote, it’s fast and ubiquitous. I pay for 50 GB of storage, bringing my total to 63.6 GB of space on my account.

My issue with Dropbox (and the main reason I switched to Evernote) was offline access for notes and files. While this isn’t available with Evernote without a subscription, Dropbox only allows offline storage for individual files, not folders.

Now, maybe it is because I’m a tinkerer, but since March, I’ve missed my Dropbox-centric workflow — especially when it comes to notes, which I like in nvALT in Markdown.

So I’m living in both camps now.

I’m keeping Evernote for PDFs and images I need offline. For the most part, these files are work-related, such as plans for the building that we’re currently constructing.

(I tried PDFpen for iOS, but iCloud choked on my 600 MB of PDFs.)

My notes, however, along with non-essential files, are back in Dropbox. It just feels … cleaner. Plus, I get to deal with plain text files, which is my preference on any platform. (I use Notesy on iOS.)

In short, I’m using the services pretty much in an opposite way from my pal Brett Kelly, but that’s okay. These tools are flexible, and that’s their greatest strength.