Notetaking application developer Evernote is set to close its primary data center this week as it finalizes its shift to Google Cloud Platform.

After revealing its intentions last September, the company has spent the last few months shifting three petabytes of data to the cloud.

Evernote
– Evernote/Michael Coté

Noteworthy

“Although every engineering endeavor is different and encounters unique challenges, cloud migration efforts of this magnitude usually take longer than expected (9-12 months) and consume more resources than originally estimated,”  Evernote’s senior technical writer SiNing Chan said in a blog post earlier this month.

“Driven by our commitment to minimizing disruptions to your service, we did it in just 70 days. In this short time frame, we successfully moved 5 billion notes and 5 billion attachments over to our new cloud-based infrastructure. That’s over 3 petabytes of data. To give you some context, that’s equivalent to moving enough content to fill up 10+ copies* of all the books ever published in all of modern history.”

Speaking to InformationWeek, CTO Anirban Kundu confirmed that the company plans to close its primary facility this week, and is around 50 days from being able to shut down its secondary data center.

Data was transfered in 800GB shards - by the end of the first week, the company was transfering up to 16 shards a day. By the end of the second week, it hit 32 shards a day. The most the company managed was 318 shards in a day.

During the move, Evernote kept three copies of its data to ensure that nothing was lost.