Duplicate Notes Utility / Content Comparison

[gazumped 10,395]

As a backup to the frequent issues raised here to do with note conflicts and duplicates I'd like to suggest that Evernote add a utility to the Help menu to check an account for duplicated notes and highlight any differences in content. 

This won't help identify or remove conflicting change notes that have two or more different versions of text in the same note (unless someone can come up with a check that would find them),  but it would help find all duplicates by created date and title or (maybe) the first line(s) of the content,  and could highlight any differences between similar versions of one note.

Since the common editor is now (?) in place across all platforms,  this 'should' be at least possible,  and maybe even helpful in controlling the size of synced databases,  and improving sync speeds.

[jefito 5,586]

Just to be clear, this is something that can be done independent of the editors, common or no. Duplicate finding would operate on note content, which has always been available via the API.

Modulo that nitpick, I've upvoted.  

[GotMetalBoy 8]

This would be a great feature and save a lot of time. I currently copy and paste the contents of duplicate notes into Notepad++ and then use the Compare 2.0 plugin but it's not a good workaround.

[Patrick Wacker 1]

A duplicate content finder would be great as well. I may have the same file in more than one note and may want to delete/streamline notes. 

[gazumped 10,395]

Attachments might be a different issue - someone reported an something a while ago where they were unable to save a changed file back to a note (only the dates had changed,  the name had not) - the 'new' file always reverted back to the original and the most recent changes were lost.  Evernote seemed to have some intelligence built in that would only accept one copy of a file with a specific name.  Don't think anyone tested that to see whether files attached to separate notes are the 'same' file though.

Anyhoo: any internal or third party developers watching might like to give a comparison app a little love - it would be an ideal item for the toolkit to turn up potentially redundant content or attachments and -apparently- a small number of users some peace of mind...

Meantime I'd repeat that once you've uploaded content,  duplicated or not,  it does you no good whatsoever to spend time finding it and removing it unless and until you actually need the content for something practical.  When you search and find duplicated notes,  you can purge them from the system as part of your search process.  Unless you have lots of spare time you need to fill (I don't) anything else is just wheel spinning.