You have a secret email address that you can send anything to and it will show up in your Evernote Inbox.

Not only does it allow you store a wide variety of data types, but it provides organization through the use of metadata like Tags and Notebooks. It provides that access through a large number of clients and via the web, and it does an outstanding job at providing the access, but ultimately, it’s just a storage container.Įvernote transforms your data. Which service provides you that extra “something” that makes you see a reason to use it over the other?ĭropbox provides you access to your files. This is where strong differentiation occurs. These capabilities go a bit beyond the native Operating System capabilities and when coupled with the fact that scanned documents and handwritten notes can also now be searched, I believe Evernote edge out Dropbox here. Evernote also provides “Related Notes” capabilities when you’re reading or editing a note, which will display other notes in your Library that it believes are similar. Tags are a great way to organize documents and notes in a matrix, so you can quickly find all of the related items to a specific tag. The bad is that if you don’t like those capabilities, or if they are insufficient for what you want to do, there’s not much you can do about it.Įvernote supports tags, so immediately you have an organizational method not available in Dropbox. On a Macintosh this means that Spotlight will index your entire Dropbox and all the capabilities of the native OS searching are available to you. The good is that you can use any search/index capabilities that are native, or added, to your Operating System. Robust search and organizational paradigms are essential to making a service valuable.ĭropbox is a folder on your hard drive that is synchronized to “The Cloud” and then to your various endpoints. Having these cloud services where you can upload all of your digital information is wonderful, until you want to find something. Winner: Dropbox, though I think this could be a tie, however Dropbox doesn’t alter your data in any way Finding your Stuff The desktop client also allows you to export all of your data as HTML or well-formatted XML, both of which would give you access again (though probably not with the same organization). The desktop client does not require Internet access in order to grant you access to your data, so their servers can quit at any time. To get your data back if Dropbox fails, just copy it out of your Dropbox folder (not even technically necessary).Įvernote stores your data locally and synchronizes it to your other devices. If you haven’t explicitly excluded your Dropbox folder from your backups, then you probably not only have a copy on your drive, but also in your backups. So, what happens if the worst occurs and one morning you wake up to read that Evernote or Dropbox is out of business and the service is no longer available?ĭropbox creates copies of your data on each of the endpoints you enable, in addition to having a copy online. Just ask folks with blogs at JournalSpace or users with files stored at Megaupload. It’s always possible that either Dropbox or Evernote could go out of business. Another feature is “Local Notebooks” where the notebook you create is not sent to the Evernote servers, this provides some measure of security, but at the price of functionality (that notebook will not appear on any of your other devices). To make up for that, you can encrypt portions of a note (text only), and when you do this, it is “Trust No One” and you’re the only one who can decrypt it. Details can be found in their Help Center.Įvernote isn’t quite as good as Dropbox, they do use SSL for data transmission, but they also do not encrypt the data at rest. Ultimately, Dropbox does provide encryption in transit (SSL) and stores your data encrypted at rest (AES-256), however the encryption keys are held by Dropbox and Dropbox has access to your data and will use it (“when legally required to do so”). Is my data stored encrypted or in the clear on the provider’s servers? Who has access to my data besides me? Is the service “Trust No One”?ĭropbox famously blew itself up on this point, first stating their employees “cannot access your data” and then backtracking when it was pointed out that they in fact could.

I’m a bit of a security buff, so I want to tackle security first. I use both of these services, extensively, so wanted to give my opinion on how they each stack up in four different categories: Security, Data Integrity, Search, and X-Factor (that little something extra). Just about everyone has heard of these two services and I wanted to explore why you’d use one over the other.

I got into a discussion the other day around the merits of Evernote versus Dropbox.

Evernote vs dropbox vs google drive