Evernote storage & system limits explained + New Update

Newsletter Housekeeping: Evernote version 10.59.5 is out for PCs and Macs and you can now move the location of your Evernote data to another hard drive. More about this at the bottom of this post. Also, a new Triple 'T' Productivity Podcast episode is out. I’m chatting with Nutritionist Nikki Burnett about how diet can affect our productivity.

Note: This article was edited on 3rd Dec 2023 to reflect changes to the free plan. Updated again 9th July 2024 to reflect increases to note & notebook limits.

We all kind of just throw things at Evernote. Notes, PDFs, receipts, divorce papers, they all get chucked into the green elephant and forgotten about until we need them.

But what about the storage limits? Are you ever going to run out of space?

This week I’m digging into storage and limits.

Start counting your notes!

Overall Evernote storage space

This is sort of unlimited, but not really and we’ll come to that in a bit, but there are no overall limits on how many gigabytes of data you can store in Evernote. You are not going to run out of space.

Evernote monthly upload limits

One of the things that acts as a limitation is the monthly upload limit, which is based on the plan you have. This is measured in megabytes and gigabytes.

So if you’re on the free plan you get 60MB of uploads every month.

The Personal plan is 10GB per month and the Professional plan is 20GB per month.

Once you hit this monthly limit you can’t upload anymore until the next month.

To find out how much of the monthly limit you have left head to this page within your Evernote account.

So the overall storage is kind of unlimited in the sense that if you were on the Professional plan and used 20GB every month for 20 years no one would stop you.

Evernote note limits

Every note also has a limit based on your plan. If your notes are text based then don’t worry, the only thing that really effects the note size is attachments like images and PDFs.

The free plan gives you a note limit of 25MB.

The Personal and Professional plan note limit is 200MB.

To find the size of an individual note, open it, hit the three dots at the top right hand side (desktop) and select Note Info.

You can also use the keyboard shortcuts CTRL + SHIFT + I for PC or ⇧ ⌘ I for Macs.

If you hit the note size limit you’ll get a warning and the best thing would be to move attachments to a cloud drive and then link to them from the note or create more than one note.

There is also a limit of the number of notes you can store in Evernote and its a very large 150,000! For the free plan this is 50 so you can try it out.

The chances of anyone hitting that limit are slim but if you do try merging notes or have a good cleanup.

Evernote Notebook Limits

This is pretty straightforward. If you’re on the free plan, then you get 1 notebook and Personal and Professional plans get 2000.

Evernote tag limits

Are you a tag user or are you like me, tags equal chaos?

If you love a tag then you’ll be glad to know all plans including the free plan have a limit of 10,000 tags! Why I don’t know… for me this would lead to total meltdown!

There’s also a limit on how many tags you can add to each note and for all plans, including free its 100. Again, total chaos!

Email into Evernote limits

One of Evernote’s most popular features is being able to forward or send emails and have them turn up as a note, including the attachments.

This feature is only available for paid plans where the limit is set at 200 emails per day.

If you’re on the free plan, then you can try the feature out as there’s a limit of five emails for the lifetime of the free plan.

Evernote saved templates limit

The Personal and Professional plans let you create custom templates from notes and save them in your own personal template gallery.

The limit for this is 20 templates.

If you hit this limit you could create a “Template” notebook to store all your custom templates and then copy/duplicate and move a note whenever you need it.

Evernote shortcut limit

Shortcuts in Evernote are like favourites and you can add them to the sidebar or load them up as a widget on your home dashboard.

You can create shortcuts for notes, notebooks, saved searches and tags.

The maximum number of shortcuts is 250 for all plans including the free plan.

I think having 250 shortcuts could make things a little unmanageable.

I like to think of shortcuts as very fluid. I create and delete shortcuts everyday depending on what I’m working on and I don’t have too many at one time.

Evernote saved searches limit

Evernote search is really powerful and paid plans get access to different search operators so if you find yourself searching for the same thing many times, just save it as a search.

The maximum number of saved searches for any plan, including free is 100.

Local PC/Mac Storage (new feature)

A new feature released in version 10.59.5 (now on the download page) that will be very useful for a lot of folk is the ability to move the location of the Evernote database on your PC or Mac.

Evernote stores a copy of your notes, attachments and everything else on your PC or Mac hard drive and things sync to the cloud.

Think of the web version of Evernote as kind of the master copy of your data as this comes directly from Evernote’s servers. All your other devices then sync to the cloud, pretty instantly due to Real Time Sync.

If you lose your internet connection then you can carry on using Evernote as all your data is on your hard drive. Once reconnected the app will sync again.

This does mean there’s a full copy of your notes on your hard drive and if your hard drive gets low on space there may be issues.

The first thing you’ll notice is a warning pop up when you get down to 5GB of free space. You can disable this warning if you want by going to Preferences —> Application —> Advanced.

If you are running out of hard drive space or you want to store Evernote on an external SSD or NAS drive then you can. Just head over to Preferences —> Application —> Advanced and change the location.

Just click the three dots on the right hand side of the box and select a new location.

Phew! That’s it, I’m off to buy a new external drive just for my Evernote data!

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon