Evernote Bleeds Information From 7,000 Users

According to the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shinbun, Evernote seems to have lost some user data in a server mishap. Over a multi-day period, from July 1st to the July 4th, some 7000 Evernote users fell through the company’s backup and redundancy procedures, losing their saved data from that period.

The company has some 3.5 million users, meaning that the 7000 impacted people represent around one fifth of one percent of the total Evernote userbase.

The company has offered free upgrades to users who experienced the problem. Evernote sent the following message to everyone impacted negatively by the data loss (abridged):

We’re writing to tell you about a potential problem which may have occurred with your Evernote account a few days ago. One of our servers suffered a series of serious hardware failures over the Fourth of July weekend. Our automatic redundancy and backup systems recovered the vast majority of the data and most users did not experience any problems.

Unfortunately, the servers may have failed to properly record new notes and edits made by a small group of users (less than one fifth of one percent) between July 1 and July 4. Your account is in the group potentially affected. We’re writing to suggest that you attempt to recover or recreate any important notes that may be missing from that time using the information stored on your Evernote desktop application.

This was an isolated, one-time occurrence so any notes from before July 1st or after July 4th will not be affected. We have revised our management, backup, and monitoring systems to prevent this type error in the future. We apologize for our mistake and for your inconvenience (even if you didn’t lose any notes, you still had to read this email).

As a further apology, we have upgraded your account to Evernote Premium for one year. In addition to a much higher monthly quota and some powerful new features, a Premium account will ensure that you get priority tech support should you have any lingering problems or questions from this disruption. If you were already a Premium subscriber – thanks! – we have extended your subscription by an additional year at no charge.

Thank you for finding us and for using Evernote. We are committed to constantly improving our product and providing you with the best possible experience now and in the future. Please do not hesitate to contact me directly if you want any additional information about this error, need help with the recovery procedures below, or just have ideas about how we can make Evernote more useful for you.

As far as screw ups and apologies go, this one was well handled. Everyone else take note, when you make a mistake in your product, find it, fix it, and then help everyone impacted get back to where they need to be and tack on a little something for their troubles.

Good on Evernote for making this right.