How to export your Evernote notes: the complete guide

Exporting your notes out of Evernote is not hard, exactly. It is just full of small traps that nobody warns you about until you hit one: the export button that is not in the app you are using, the silent 100-note ceiling, the giant export that fails at 80% with no explanation, and the things that quietly do not survive the trip.

This guide covers all of it. You do not need to be leaving Evernote to want a copy of your own notes — a yearly export is a reasonable thing to have regardless.

The short version

• Export notebook by notebook, not note by note. Selecting notes caps you at 100 at a time; exporting a whole notebook has no such limit.
• You must use the Mac or Windows desktop app. There is no export in the web app or on mobile.
• Choose ENEX if you are moving to another notes app. Choose HTML if you want files you can read forever without any app at all.
• If you have a lot of notebooks, skip the clicking and use evernote-backup, a free open-source tool that exports everything in one go.
• Note links, tag hierarchy and version history do not survive the export. Plan for that before you delete anything.

Before you start: do not delete anything yet

The single most common way people lose notes in a migration is deleting the source before verifying the copy. Export first, import into wherever you are going, spot-check a handful of your most complicated notes — the ones with tables, PDFs, scans, checklists — and only then think about cancelling or deleting.

Keep the .enex files afterwards, too. They are your raw backup, they are just XML, and they will still open in ten years.

Exporting from the desktop app

Export lives only in the Mac and Windows apps. If Evernote is only on your phone, install the desktop app and let it sync fully before you start — a partial sync exports partial notes.

One notebook at a time:

1. In the left sidebar, find the notebook you want.
2. Right-click it and choose Export Notebook.
3. Pick your format — ENEX for another app, HTML for plain readable files.
4. If you choose ENEX, Evernote offers a maximum file size per .enex file, selectable between roughly 300 MB and 2 GB. Take the smaller end. Smaller files are more likely to import cleanly on the other side.
5. Save it somewhere you will remember, named after the notebook.

Repeat for each notebook. It is tedious and there is no “export all” button, which is the single biggest complaint about this process and the reason the CLI below exists.

A selection of notes: select them, right-click, Export Notes. This is where the 100-note limit bites — Evernote will not export more than 100 selected notes in one operation. If you are trying to move 3,000 notes this way you will be at it for a very long time. Export the notebook instead.

Getting past the 100-note limit

There are three honest options.

Option one: export by notebook. The limit applies to selected notes, not notebooks. If your library is well organised into notebooks, this is the whole answer and you can stop reading this section.

Option two: temporarily reorganise. If you have thousands of notes sitting in one enormous notebook, create a few new notebooks and move notes into them in batches, then export each. Clumsy, but it works, and it costs nothing.

Option three: use evernote-backup. This is what we would actually do.

evernote-backup is a free, open-source command-line tool that syncs your entire Evernote account into a local SQLite database and then exports it as .enex files. It does not care about the 100-note limit and it does not need you to click anything 40 times.

pip install evernote-backup

evernote-backup init-db
evernote-backup sync
evernote-backup export output_dir/

By default it writes one .enex per notebook, which is exactly the shape most importers want. --single-notes gives you one file per note instead, and --include-trash brings the trash along. The export step runs entirely offline against the local database, so once the sync is done you can re-export as many times as you like without touching Evernote again.

It is a third-party tool and you should treat it as one — read the README, and be aware you are authenticating against your Evernote account. It is widely used and the source is public, which is more than can be said for most of the “Evernote export tool” downloads that turn up in search results. We would avoid those entirely.

ENEX or HTML?

ENEX is Evernote’s own XML export format. It is what every other notes app expects when it offers an “import from Evernote” button. Pick this if you are moving somewhere specific.

HTML gives you a folder of web pages you can open in any browser forever, with no software dependency at all. Pick this if what you actually want is an archive you will never import anywhere — or do both, since exporting twice costs you nothing but disk space.

Most people should do both. ENEX for the move, HTML for the shoebox in the attic.

What ENEX does not carry

This is the part that gets left out of most export guides, and it is the part that matters most.

What comes across: note titles, note content and formatting, creation and update dates, tags, and attachments — images, PDFs, scans and other files are embedded in the .enex itself. Newer versions of the ENEX specification also carry task and reminder attributes.

What does not:

• Links between notes. Evernote note links are internal evernote:// references that point at Evernote’s own structure. Once exported, they point at nothing. If you have built a personal wiki out of linked notes, this is the loss that will hurt, and there is no clean fix — budget time to re-link the important ones by hand afterwards.
• Version history. Evernote does not put previous versions of a note in an export. Whatever the note looks like on export day is the only version you get.
• Tag hierarchy. If you nested tags, they come out as a flat list. The tags survive, their parent-child structure does not.
• Saved searches. Not part of the format.
• Notebook structure, within a single file. An .enex file is a flat list of notes — the notebook name lives in the filename, not inside the file. This is precisely why exporting notebook-by-notebook matters: it is what preserves your structure. A single giant export of everything arrives at the other end as one undifferentiated pile.

That last point is worth repeating because it is the one that silently ruins migrations. Export notebook by notebook and your organisation survives. Export everything into one file and it does not.

When the export fails

Large exports fail more often than small ones, usually with an unhelpful error or by simply stopping. Things that help, in order of how often they work:

1. Make the files smaller. Choose the lower end of the ENEX file-size option, or split a huge notebook into several smaller ones first.
2. Check the notebook has finished syncing. Exporting while a sync is in progress is a reliable way to get a partial file.
3. Look for one bad note. A single corrupt attachment can take down an entire notebook export. Bisect it — export half the notebook, then the other half, and narrow down.
4. Use the CLI. evernote-backup sidesteps most of this because it syncs to a local database first and exports from that, so a network hiccup does not cost you the whole run.

If you used Evernote Legacy, the old pre-v10 desktop app, you may remember a smoother bulk export. That app has been retired and is no longer a supported route.

Where your notes can go next

Once you have .enex files, most serious notes apps will take them — Obsidian, Joplin, Notion, Apple Notes, Bear, Notesnook, and others all offer some form of ENEX import, with varying fidelity. The quality of those importers differs a great deal, which is a subject for its own post.

We make Harbor, so read this last bit with appropriate scepticism.

Harbor takes .enex files directly, one or many, and shows live progress as it goes — “42 of 900” — so a big import is not a black box. Your notebooks, tags and attachments come across, and afterwards Harbor runs OCR over the attachments, which means the text inside your old scans and photos becomes searchable in a way it never was in Evernote’s free tier. What comes across in an import is documented in full, including what does not.

We are also honest about the ENEX ceiling: nothing can import what Evernote did not export. Your note history starts fresh, and your note links will need rebuilding, no matter which app you land on. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not tried it.

If you are still weighing the move, we wrote up what Evernote actually costs now, what Bending Spoons has done to Evernote since buying it, the Evernote alternative case, and the complaints that come up most often — including the ones aimed at us.

Sources

Export steps, formats and the ENEX file-size option reflect Evernote’s own Export Notes and Notebooks as ENEX or HTML help article. The 100-note selection limit is documented in Evernote’s help and widely reported by users on the Evernote user forum. The CLI commands and flags are from the evernote-backup README. The ENEX format details — which attributes each specification version carries — are described in MyInfo’s ENEX format write-up.

Last verified: August 11, 2026. Evernote changes its apps regularly — if a step here no longer matches what you see, tell us at hello@harbor.my and we will fix it and re-date this line.