Peter Quiel used Evernote for more than ten years. The 13 January 2024 post is the field report. He needed Linux, Android, and files he owned. After the Linux client went quiet, Evernote stopped being that system.
He had thousands of notes. The official importer wanted them in batches of 50 or 100. He could not remember which cap. It did not matter. He wrote an exporter instead.
If you are looking at the same route, start with the Evernote → Obsidian playbook. Obsidian’s ENEX import is the last step. Peter’s problem was getting a complete export out of Evernote.
Why he left
Ian Small’s January 2020 post promised a redesigned stack and a Linux client. Peter tried the beta, maybe in 2021. In June 2023 he asked where it stood. The answer was a blog post. Earlier announcements were gone.
Search in PDFs and images still worked. He did not find another hosted app that matched it and also ran on Linux, synced to his own storage, and used an open format.
Obsidian sat on local Markdown. He synced the vault through pCloud in Europe with Autosync on Android. Plugins covered PDF search. He already liked AsciiDoc, so Markdown was an easy trade.
The exporter
Evernote’s desktop export writes ENEX or HTML. Obsidian Importer reads ENEX. Peter says the client only exported 100 notes at once, and it dropped stack and notebook structure.
A common suggestion is Evernote to Notion to Markdown. He skipped that.
He reused code from his Evernote Rsync tool and built evernote-exporter in Kotlin. One ENEX file per notebook. Folders named after stacks. Notes, resources, and metadata go with them. You pass an Evernote access token pulled from the web-client cookie, because OAuth 1.0 was not something he could ship as a small desktop app.
He also points at Yarle if you want Markdown from ENEX without Obsidian’s importer.
Once the files existed, he followed the official Import from Evernote guide and stopped writing. That part was the easy one.
Six months later
Desktop Obsidian was stable. Tables, which he used a lot in Evernote, were weak in 1.4 and close enough in 1.5.
Android was a search box. Some plugins lagged. The vault was slow to open. He accepted that.
He does not publish a note count beyond “thousands,” and he does not publish a failed-note list. I am not inventing either.
What I would copy
If the desktop export dies on a large notebook, stop using it as the source of truth. Export notebook by notebook with a tool that writes one ENEX each, or use evernote-backup the way Takao did.
Name the files so stacks become folders. Obsidian can read Stack@@@Notebook in the ENEX filename.
Keep Evernote up until search in the new vault finds a known PDF, a known tag, and a known internal link.
The Evernote → Obsidian playbook is the checklist. Use Peter’s exporter when the official 100-note batches are the blocker.