Comments on: Maintenance Alert: Feb 6th 11am-4pm Pacific Time

By: evermulla

evermulla — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:34:03 +0000

two days later and everything works fine.

i have read all the comments and have nothing to say.

just these two quotes:

quit your whining
(rob parn)

you gotta do what ya gotta do
(Mark)

well said.
thanks to the evernote-staff who did the job.

By: Cheryl F. {The Lucky Ladybug}

Cheryl F. {The Lucky Ladybug} — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:21:58 +0000

Why would you schedule maintenance on a weekend during the day? Poor planning! Why not during the week late, late night when most people are asleep?!?

Why should users be required to read the blog to learn about outages? There should be a better way to get the word out!!

By: Roger

Roger — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:56:26 +0000

I would really have appreciated email warning on this one, guys. Take note for the next time. I’m a Premium user.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:17:41 +0000

@ Matt……Evernote…down…I’m…curled…up….in….fetal…position….on…..floor….catatonic….state….please…Evernote….come back!….need…to regain…..composure and sanity…..can’t live…4 hours…without….my…evernote!!

By: CLewis

CLewis — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:53:03 +0000

Ok, wouldn’t it have made sense to roll out this update at midnight when pretty much nobody is using their accounts? I rely heavily on Evernote on my Palm Pre. So I went off to do errands, and when I arrive, surprise, Evernote is offline. So while I appreciate the upgrade in terms of sustainability, I definitely think you guys should think how to minimize pain when this happens. If that requires an all-nighter, so be it, that’s the price of being No. 1, isn’t it?

(I have some moral background for this, I’ve been a premium customer for almost a year now).

By: Paul Cone

Paul Cone — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:24:49 +0000

It would have been nice if I knew about this before I just typed my huge to-do list into Evernote and then left the house, unable to get it on my iPhone. Late at night would’ve been less disruptive.

By: Glenda

Glenda — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:13:37 +0000

Does “shiny new Evernote” = “shiny new features” too (drool)? (Even if it = “shiny new servers” and that’s all, I’m still grateful. I agree with Russ.)

By: chad

chad — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:10:52 +0000

I have to say bad decision on timing…this couldn’t have waited until the evening?

By: Samatva

Samatva — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:00:15 +0000

Was there an e-mail notification? This is one of the few types of commercial e-mail that is welcomed! I recently moved my e-mail to a new server, so should have solved any issues receiving mail, but got nothing about this outage.

Also, it *is* possible to incrementally roll out the upgraded servers – i.e. have all the servers up and running, then disable one account (or a few) at a time on the old system and bring it back up on the new a few moments later – it’s harder that way, but less down time per user.

Lastly, but most importantly, whether I do a rolling switch or en-mass switch, I *always* to it in what is the middle of the night for the majority of my clients – maybe starting as early as 11pm, but usually after midnight. Sysadmins are paid well enough to pull the occasional night shift!

It’s not that this service is vitally important, but for me to use it more, I have to be able to depend on it… getting to the grocery store today with no access to my shopping list was a minor annoyance, but a major confidence shaker.

Notify us and minimize disruptions.

My 2 cents’ worth,
Samatva

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:59:51 +0000

This is just a suggestion for future upgrades, but perhaps a block of time from 11PM-5AM would have been better? I realize Evernote is global someone will always be affected during normal hours, but since your in CA and probably have a huge userbase in the U.S., it would have had less impact on most users.

I only suggest because we also had to recently upgrade servers within my company and shifted to after hours to do so. It wasn’t much fun being up through the night, but sometimes you gotta do what ya gotta do.

By: Dallas

Dallas — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:39:49 +0000

For some reason, I never saw a notification of this event until I tried to sync. While I understand the need, I would have preferred it to be done during the early morning — 2-6 AM — some of us work on the weekends!

By: Bobo

Bobo — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:38:06 +0000

could have picked a better time. how about midnight? really bummed out.

By: roy

roy — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:35:32 +0000

Guess this kills the ‘ever’ part of Evernote. Don’t know why I was expecting 24/7 service or why this couldn’t be done from 1am to 5am Sunday morning.

By: Cheryl F. {The Lucky Ladybug}

Cheryl F. {The Lucky Ladybug} — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:34:55 +0000

Why would you schedule maintenance on a weekend during the day? Poor planning! Why not during the week late, late night when most people are asleep?!?

By: evern00b

evern00b — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:35:53 +0000

I’m glad you guys sent out an update over twitter so I expected this. Also, I hope the changes don’t break anything!

But how do you guys make sure that EVERY evernote user gets that warning message? I didn’t see any warning box to click on regarding evernote server maintenance or anything like that in my client. I’m not requesting that feature either, however … if this becomes something that’s commonplace (hopefully that wont happen) that might be a good idea to have a way of updating ALL users other than posting it on the evernote website.

Maybe send out a “server maintenance” email or something?

Just a thought. Keep up the great work!

By: Scott

Scott — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 02:01:32 +0000

good luck with the outage window and thanks for rolling out the fix (on the Windows client) for the black screen coming out of hibernation.

Adding to the “things to do while Evernote is improving” thread: It will probably take people out east at least five hours to dig out from the snow that is in process now…

By: Chris Wadge

Chris Wadge — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:52:22 +0000

As one of the IT staffers at Evernote, maybe I can help clear things up a bit. As Andrew already said, your data is redundant at the disk level per machine, but also at the machine level. On top of that, we also have full offsite backups. So, usually hardware maintenance wouldn’t cause any downtime at all. In this case, we’re doing infrastructure upgrades, and we felt it was best to just dedicate one contiguous block of time to getting it all accomplished at once. We don’t anticipate any more disruptions like this one going forward.

By: Awesome-O

Awesome-O — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:07:06 +0000

@Jeff: Which part? Maintaining their infrastructure, or warning us about the downtime? Beats a fail whale.

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:32:13 +0000

Welcome to Cloud Computing!

By: Andrew Sinkov

Andrew Sinkov — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:01:14 +0000

@Eric, that a great question.

Evernote stores all of the data for groups of users on independent servers that we refer to as “shards”. Each shard is made up of two separate boxes that have internal redundancy for all data (mirrored on pairs of disks). Your data is also continually replicated from the primary box in each shard to its peer, so that we always have at least 4 separate copies of your current data, supplemented by nightly backups and weekly offsite data storage.

By: David

David — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:22:38 +0000

This highlights another fundamental problem with the new email-from-evernote “feature”. If I have to use their service to email information and the service is down….
Please bring back the old way of emailing notes; or give us a choice.

By: Eric F

Eric F — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:04:25 +0000

This is more of a general question, because it sounds like Evernote only stores my data on a single server. If that server were to be damaged or crash, would my data on the Evernote servers be lost?

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:28:06 +0000

No Jeff… actually the servers crashing because too many users tried to access it at the same time would be the LEAST favorite thing Evernote could do to you. If that happened, the service would probably be down a lot longer than 5 hours.

Really though? You can’t go 5 hours without Evernote? Play a video game, watch some TV, read a few magazines, and unplug from the Internet… I wouldn’t want to be around you when the power goes out.

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:00:36 +0000

Follow the link to get time conversion for your specific time zone

http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc

By: Andy Cook

Andy Cook — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:13:17 +0000

This is fine by me if it is part of the strategy to fix issues with note display on the Windows Mobile client since creating notes is the only thing I can do at the moment anyway….