← Back to all services
Productivity
Evernote
Updated May 30, 2026
Evernote is where notes go to be forgotten, and its export is the most manual process on this site. There is no single export everything button in the current app: you take each notebook individually, as ENEX or HTML, and an account with dozens of notebooks is a long afternoon. The offset is that the format is genuinely portable, which most note apps cannot say. Every note, tag and attachment comes with it.
What you'll get
Note content: text, formatting, and checklistsNotebooks and nested notebook stacksTags, preserved as #hashtags in the note bodyAttachments, in a resources folder alongside HTML exportsNote metadata: created and updated timestampsInternal note links and per-notebook table of contents
Before you start
- Install the Evernote desktop app for Windows or Mac, because export does not exist in the web or mobile apps, which catches out anyone who only ever uses their phone
- Sign in with the account you want to export. Personal and work accounts are entirely separate, so export each one separately
- Open the Notebooks view so you can see your full notebook list and roughly how many notes each holds
- Budget your time: you are exporting notebook by notebook, so a 40-notebook account means 40 export operations. Do it in batches
How to download
- Select a notebook in the left-hand notebook panel
- Right-click the notebook (or use the ••• "More actions" menu) and choose Export Notebook…
- Choose a format: .enex for backup, or HTML if you just need to read the notes in a browser
- Pick a destination folder and save. For HTML, Evernote creates a folder with the notes plus an attached resources folder
- Repeat for every remaining notebook. This is the step people miss, since one notebook is not a full backup
- Selecting individual notes instead of a notebook is capped at 100 at a time, so the per-notebook route is faster in practice
- If you still have Evernote Legacy installed, it retains a one-click "export all notebooks" option, which is the fastest path to a complete archive if you can get it running
Pro tip
Use ENEX, not HTML. ENEX is the only format that preserves tags, attachments, and timestamps well enough to round-trip; HTML is for reading and migration, not backup.
After the download
- Open a few .enex files and confirm your notes actually render. A corrupt or empty export is worse than no export, because it looks like a backup
- If you exported HTML, check the resources folder is really populated. An empty one means your attachments did not come across
- Do not re-import your ENEX into Evernote to "test" it. Importing creates duplicate notes rather than merging with the originals, and you will have to clean them up by hand
- Keep the ENEX files as a cold copy in your normal backup storage, since they are the only format that reliably re-imports
- If your goal is to move to a different notes app rather than archive, export ENEX as the source format; most migration tools (Trilium among them) read .enex directly
- Not sure where to store your export? See our backup guide.