I start using Evernote many years ago with Evernote non-CN edition. The Chinese version of it, Yinxiangbiji, yixiang.com, was non-existant. Its importance and use cases for me varied as I change my routines. For a while I even developed an all-in-one alternative diary.

Alas, it proved to be impossible, to duplicate all of a proper cloud note-taking app while keeping a part-time-ish commitment level. So I crawled back to Evernote.

I first started to consider a migration to Evernote CN when I was experiencing slow sync speed in China. Later on I discovered that Evernote CN rolled out Markdown support and save-from-wechat feature. Neat! I decided to give it a try.

It’s not worth mentioning the exact migration process. It’s much more troublesome than expected, considering it’s THE SAME APP and same program running. I had to migrate notebook by notebook to keep its organization, because apparently meta like notebook structures are not exported and can’t be imported.

Then and there the nightmare begins. Not only switching account is extremely difficult (you turn on developer mode using the famous Konami code. I’m not joking), but also it’s stubborn and it dies hard. After a whole afternoon spent getting all setups done and made payment, when I thought I can use it happily ever after, connectivity issues emerged. Apparently Evernote CN doesn’t have any servers abroad because, for what? Not their territory.

I eventually decided to migrate back. Believe me it’s painful. The markdown support was half-hearted. My 1000-line file couldn’t be rendered / synced and I’m lazy to binary-search to find the offending line. And save-from-wechat was given to Evernote Intl too (though slower).

This time the migration was all too smooth, for the wrong reason (I’ve done it once!).

With such imperfect man with all their imperfections, we strive to build software to perfection. What a lost cause.