Migration
Bring ten years
of Evernote across.
ClearNote reads Evernote’s own export files, rebuilds your notebooks, keeps every attachment byte-for-byte — and then shows you the arithmetic.
Your Evernote account is never touched.
ClearNote reads the export files you make. It does not log in, and it does not modify the files it reads. If an import goes wrong you still have everything you started with, and re-running it does not create duplicates.
Step 1 — Export from Evernote
- Right-click a notebookIn Evernote’s sidebar, right-click the notebook and choose Export Notebook.
- Choose ENEXPick ENEX as the format, and tick the option to include tags.
- Save one file per notebookSave each notebook as its own
.enexfile into a single folder — for example a folder called Evernote Exports.
One file per notebook matters: ENEX does not record which notebook a note belonged to, so the filename is how ClearNote rebuilds your structure. Receipts.enex becomes a notebook called Receipts. Files in subfolders become notebook stacks.
Step 2 — Import into ClearNote
- Choose Move from EvernoteIt is in the File menu on the Mac, and behind the filter button on iPhone.
- Pick your folderDrop the whole folder in, or choose individual
.enexfiles. - Read the preflightBefore anything is written, ClearNote scans the files and shows what it found: how many notes, tags, attachments and bytes.
- Check the notebook mappingEvery file is listed with the notebook it will become. Edit any name, or leave a file out entirely.
- Choose what happens to duplicatesThe default skips notes already in your library, so re-running an import is safe.
- ImportProgress shows the current file, the current notebook, notes processed, attachments processed, and anything that needs reviewing.
Step 3 — Read the report
This is the part that matters. When the import finishes, ClearNote shows the counts side by side:
- Notes found in the source, against notes imported, skipped and replaced
- Attachments found against attachments stored
- Attachment bytes expected against bytes actually stored, re-read from disk
- Tags found and imported, notebooks created, checkboxes converted, reminders converted
- Every warning, with the note and the file it came from
If a single figure does not match, the report does not say the import succeeded. It says the counts did not match, keeps your export files untouched, and offers a Review Issues list. You can save the report as JSON or plain text, and ClearNote keeps it.
What comes across
Everything textual
Titles, paragraphs, headings, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, links, bulleted and numbered lists, nested lists, blockquotes, tables and dividers.
Checkboxes as checklists
Evernote’s en-todo checkboxes become real ClearNote checklist items, with their checked state intact.
Every attachment
Images, PDFs, audio, documents and file types nobody recognises. Stored byte-for-byte with their original filenames and MIME types, hashed and verified.
Dates and tags
Created and updated timestamps, and every tag, matched case-insensitively so you do not end up with three spellings of the same thing.
Metadata you forgot was there
Author, source URL, source application, geolocation, subject date, reminders. Anything ClearNote does not model natively is kept whole rather than dropped.
The original itself
Every imported note keeps its untouched Evernote source alongside the converted version, so a future ClearNote can rebuild from it.
What does not, and what happens instead
Being straight about this is the point of the page.
- Encrypted text. Evernote can encrypt part of a note with a passphrase ClearNote does not have. Those blocks become a visible placeholder saying so, the encrypted original is preserved with the note, and they are counted in the report.
- Images that were never in the export. Some clipped notes reference a picture on the web rather than storing it. ClearNote does not fetch those automatically — that would tell the host you opened the note — so it leaves a marker and lists them.
- Tables. These come across and display correctly, and their text is searchable. ClearNote’s editor keeps them exactly as Evernote wrote them rather than re-flowing them, so editing inside a table asks you to convert it to plain text first. That is a deliberate trade: no silent rewriting of markup we cannot perfectly reproduce.
- Anything unrecognised. Markup ClearNote has no model for has its tags removed and its text kept, and the count appears in the report. Nothing is dropped without being counted.
These behaviours are covered by an automated test suite that runs against deliberately hostile fixtures — malformed XML, truncated files, corrupt attachments, unusual encodings, right-to-left text, emoji, huge notes — and a failing migration test blocks a release.
Common questions
How large a library can it handle?
The importer streams: it reads one note at a time and decodes attachment data incrementally, so a multi-gigabyte export does not have to fit in memory. Imports save in batches and can be stopped and resumed; everything already imported stays.
What if I import the same file twice?
By default nothing happens. ClearNote fingerprints each source note from its title, creation date, content and attachment hashes, and skips the ones it already has. You can also choose to keep both copies, or to replace — and replacing keeps the version it replaced in the note’s history.
Can I go back?
Your Evernote export files are never modified, so yes. And ClearNote’s own export writes ordinary HTML, Markdown and attachment files that any other app can read.
What about Evernote’s HTML export?
ENEX is the format ClearNote reads and the one that carries the most metadata, so it is what the migration wizard asks for. Individual HTML files and their attachments can be attached to notes, but the verified path is ENEX.