Onenote or Evernote?

There are lots of people that use Evernote or Onenote just fine, and it works great for them. There is a reason these two products are so popular. And if you do not have a problem with it being pretty hard to get your data out, then go for either of them.

However, as you are speaking of building an "archive" I think now would be the right time to think about what you are going to do in 1/3/5 years with all those notes and data uploaded into these services. I like cloud services a lot, but I also want a local copy that I can store somewhere safe, in case the internet is down, the company goes under, or they block my account.

Personally I had bad experiences with both Evernote and OneNote, because it was almost impossible to get the data out in a fast way. I noticed this the first time I wanted to try out a different service, and it turned out to be almost impossible to bulk export my data from Evernote and import it into OneNote. Then, the same problem when I tried to export the data from OneNote to Google Docs/Word files. So this time I made sure that I won't have the problem the next time around: Using Google Takeout, I can download a copy of all my files periodically (say every week) in Word and PDF formats and put them somewhere safe. This archive will also be readable in the future, e.g. using LibreOffice/OpenOffice or similar tools.

Word files are not the best way to take notes, but they do support a whole lot of stuff like images, videos, embedded files, etc. They are also full-text searchable on almost any OS (Mac, Win, Linux), and you can use templates and table of contents to provide structure automatically. In practice I use a few big files each with a table of contents and lot's of chapters.

For smaller notes without images that I do not intend to keep longer than a week or so, I use whatever note taking app is built-in to the system (iOS Notes for me). These then either get added to the Google Docs file, or deleted.

For anything even resembling an actionable item, task, or todo, I of course us a dedicated service (in my case Asana) with a better interface and apps. Asana offers both CSV and JSON export options, but personally I don't care too much about archiving todos/tasks.

/r/gtd Thread Parent