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Unsure if my Notes Synced Fully? -SOLVED-


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So I recently updated the sync on my evernote for my PC (Windows 7) and it appeared to work. I merged them altogether, exported them to an html file and the images straight to their own folder as well (rather than manually saving them from the html file) and then I deleted them off my phone (HTC One S). However, now it looks like I might have been over-zealous in doing so because after I deleted them off my phone I then proceeded to junk them in to the trash in my evernote PC, but as I was doing so another note appeared ALSO in the trash, which appeared to be more of the notes that were syncing. It was a little complicated, because the notes also seemed to have SOME notes that were already synced from the other notes I had merged together. So I exported those to an html and image folder as well and deleted them from my evernote on PC because they had all been copied and were definitely not updating anymore. So, uh, I'm not sure exactly what happened? I had months upon months of notes since my last export (yeah, dumb) so it's difficult to know if I'm missing anything and the text from the html files I did get, once I removed the duplicated notes and combined them in a text folder, was 827kb large.

So I'm not sure if I'm being paranoid or not.. I did attempt to look at some residual widget images on my phone after the fact and I think one might have been an image that wasn't synced (I had about 15mb of images that were retrieved from the exporting) unless it was an image I deleted and forgot that I did so, but I am kind of doubting that. So, I am really not sure how the sync works. Some questions (hoping at least some of them can be answered):

-Can evernote partially sync rather than fully?

-If evernote can sync only partially does it write over the last sync entirely or does it just write over whatever notes it's updating and if the sync is disrupted it doesn't remove the last save from the prior sync? Also, is it possible to need to sync it multiple times to get a complete sync?

-How long does it take to for the sync to work, and does the text get recorded before the images because of how small the size is, or how does that work?

...To make things more needlessly, stupidly convoluted I also synced another, older phone (also an HTC One S) afterwards with completely different notes on it. That all seemed to work fine.. however I think it synced 73 notes and when I deleted them off my phone I think it said I deleted 75? But I KNOW I gave it a lot of time to sync so I'm not exactly sure what happened there?

It's my own fault, but it's incredibly frustrating because these are my personal creative notes and cannot be replaced (I'll definitely take more care in the future), and I'm not even sure what or if I'm missing notes. At least I appear to have MOST of them if not all? Incidentally I always try to somewhat thoroughly delete things, but this time it didn't really work to my advantage at all. Unsure if there is a way to retrieve lost notes or check history to at least show me how many notes I had as of when or some such thing? Any help for some peace of mind would be greatly appreciated.

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On 2017-08-17 at 11:07 PM, AnotherEvernoteUser said:

and then I deleted them off my phone (HTC One S).

Not  a good idea; deleting notes on your phone

First, the delete is sync'd to all devices

Second, very little info is maintained on the phone.  The notes are retrieved from the cloud

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7 hours ago, AnotherEvernoteUser said:

-Can evernote partially sync rather than fully?

The latest Windows Evernote client can sync partially. See 

The mobile clients (Android and iOS) have done something similar for a while.

You should be aware that exporting all of your notes to a single file (HTML or Evernote format, ENEX) will lose notebook information; if you want to preserve that, you need to export each notebook separately.

Aside from that, it's not clear  what you were intending to accomplish, but engaging in mass operations on your note database is something to be approached with caution. Evernote Premium users can access note history; see https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313858-How-to-access-and-use-note-history

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40 minutes ago, AnotherEvernoteUser said:

Dang.. so is there any hope in retrieving any of my potentially lost notes?

I'd say No on the Evernote side; delete/expunge is permanent

For myself, I also maintain personal backups that allow me access to lost data

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9 hours ago, DTLow said:

I'd say No on the Evernote side; delete/expunge is permanent

For myself, I also maintain personal backups that allow me access to lost data

Not even as a premium member or getting in touch with evernote then? I would imagine they would have to have residual data in my account on their servers for a while.. it's just really extremely important to me, too bad I wasn't careful enough beforehand -.-

I guess I could root my phone and attempt a deleted file recovery application, however if the previous comment was true then there really won't be much in my phone memory to find as much as in the cloud itself. Oh, and did anyone know if a partial sync completely saves over the last sync or does it leave what it hasn't replaced yet in the previous sync? I update my evernote fairly regularly so if it did update only some of it but retained the rest of the last sync, I would still at least have most of my updates (I update various different notes on the list sporadically, not in a particular order) and so I would also have most of my notes.

Yeah, if there is any kind of customer service help for special circumstances at evernote I would gladly pay for it if it meant getting my notes back. I really can't explain how much it means to me.

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14 hours ago, AnotherEvernoteUser said:

Oh, and did anyone know if a partial sync completely saves over the last sync or does it leave what it hasn't replaced yet in the previous sync?

I believe EN syncs that which has not yet been synced.  It doesn't redo notes synced in a prior sync that stopped prior to completion for whatever reason.

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1 hour ago, csihilling said:

I believe EN syncs that which has not yet been synced.  It doesn't redo notes synced in a prior sync that stopped prior to completion for whatever reason.

Thanks for the response!

If that's the case then it's likely I have the majority of my notes! Thanks, csihilling, you just gave me a lot of hope!

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2 hours ago, AnotherEvernoteUser said:

Thanks for the response!

If that's the case then it's likely I have the majority of my notes! Thanks, csihilling, you just gave me a lot of hope!

You are welcome.  The way to be sure is to compare your note count by signing in at Evernote.com.  

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21 minutes ago, csihilling said:

You are welcome.  The way to be sure is to compare your note count by signing in at Evernote.com.  

Note count? Do you just mean how many notes I have on my Evernote PC account (I regretfully deleted those soon after I synced)? Or is there an actual note count history I could check (I've only seen my access history which only seems to record the dates and devices in which I accessed evernote)?

On a sidenote, I did a little experiment and deleted a new note from my phone and then synced it on my PC evernote account. The result was that it simply moved the deleted note to my trash bin, which is where I found the second collection of my notes, already merged together without my action of doing it (which was after the sync and I had moved the first merged collection of my notes to the trash bin). So I'm not sure if evernote was still merging the notes that hadn't shown up in my evernote PC notebook from the sync yet and because I moved the first collection of notes to the trash it continued to merge the secondary collection of syncing notes into its own second collection and then proceeded to follow up and move them to the trash when they first appeared because I had already given these actions to the first collection of notes that appeared in the sync..?

Well anyways, hopefully even if a partial sync did occur I still should either have had the notes I deleted off of my phone either in the partial sync notes that weren't updated or in the second collection of notes that showed up in the trash bin after the fact. I know that there were definitely only two collections of merged notes deleted, and even when I deleted them all off my phone and synced it again, no more notes showed up in my PC evernote trash bin.

..I just did another little experiment: I created a note on my phone and deleted it without syncing it to my PC first. I then synced them, and to my surprise the deleted note actually showed up in my PC evernote trash bin even though it was only ever on my phone. If that was the case for when I deleted all of my notes from my phone and re-synced it to my PC evernote, they should have either showed up in the trash separately or have been accounted for in the merged notes, I think.

Okay, I only have two last questions: Earlier in this topic it was mentioned "You should be aware that exporting all of your notes to a single file (HTML or Evernote format, ENEX) will lose notebook information; if you want to preserve that, you need to export each notebook separately." ..what notebook information is being referred to (the notes itself or something else)?

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@AnotherEvernoteUser

Note count appears in parentheses after the notebook name, when the left panel is visible or you can find it by selecting a notebook in the search information area.  So if you have Notebook.A which contains 100 notes on your desktop version, Notebook.A on the web should also have 100 notes.  It is the current count only, no historical record of note count in a notebook.

Relative to deleted notes, EN does sync the trash notebook across platforms.  So whenever you delete a note it will appear in the trash notebook on all platforms until you empty the trash, on any of those platforms.  Trash is where you have the potential to find accidentally deleted notes (provided the trash has not been emptied).

Not exactly sure what you mean by merged, but if you merge notes together using the merge option, the originals are placed in the Trash notebook.  So if you want to recover from a merge you simply go to the trash bin and restore the notes.

1 hour ago, AnotherEvernoteUser said:

Okay, I only have two last questions: Earlier in this topic it was mentioned "You should be aware that exporting all of your notes to a single file (HTML or Evernote format, ENEX) will lose notebook information; if you want to preserve that, you need to export each notebook separately." ..what notebook information is being referred to (the notes itself or something else)?

Notebook name is not included in an ENEX export file.  So most folks export to ENEX by notebook.  That way you know the notebook from which the notes came.

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8 hours ago, csihilling said:

@AnotherEvernoteUser

Note count appears in parentheses after the notebook name, when the left panel is visible or you can find it by selecting a notebook in the search information area.  So if you have Notebook.A which contains 100 notes on your desktop version, Notebook.A on the web should also have 100 notes.  It is the current count only, no historical record of note count in a notebook.

Relative to deleted notes, EN does sync the trash notebook across platforms.  So whenever you delete a note it will appear in the trash notebook on all platforms until you empty the trash, on any of those platforms.  Trash is where you have the potential to find accidentally deleted notes (provided the trash has not been emptied).

Not exactly sure what you mean by merged, but if you merge notes together using the merge option, the originals are placed in the Trash notebook.  So if you want to recover from a merge you simply go to the trash bin and restore the notes.

Notebook name is not included in an ENEX export file.  So most folks export to ENEX by notebook.  That way you know the notebook from which the notes came.

Ah, I see. Yes I used the merge option on all the notes that synced and then, after I exported them to an html file, I sent them to the trash folder. However, after I did, another note appeared in the trash (which was another collection of notes from my phone, presumably from the same sync, also merged together) where I also exported those to a separate html file (at this point I had also already deleted the notes off of my phone, before I even knew about the second collection of merged notes. In deleting them from my phone, that MAY have triggered their appearance in the trash bin in my evernote PC, although the fact that they were merged leads me to believe that was from the action I had previously just taken with the first collection of notes that appeared in the sync, as I only attempted that one merge).

..But if these two pieces of information are true:

1. evernote does not replace all of the last sync with a new sync if the new sync is only partial and incomplete

2. evernote sends all synced deleted notes to the PC evernote trash bin

..Then I think regardless of the scenario those two html files SHOULD have all my notes! There is only one thing that is troubling me a bit.. I think in my phones history I found one image from my evernotes that was not in either of the two merged notes that contained all of my notes. Unless I deleted the image prior to all of this mishap (which I don't think I did because I wanted it as a placeholder image for an idea) I'm not exactly sure why it wasn't there. I'll have to look through my notes to see if perhaps I DID delete that image and it was just residual data on my phone and I instead decided to encompass the idea as a text description rather than as the image. Otherwise maybe it was just some fluke? Either way I think this is about as close to a hopeful, satisfying result to all of this as I will get, and some peace of mind (at least I know I have MOST if not ALL of my notes). Thanks to all for the help, truly!!

EDIT: Oh, and just to add some info for the sake of other people with similar issues perusing the forums, the second collection of notes that appeared merged as one weren't all new; it was a collection of SOME (not all) of the previously synced notes, as well as some other various notes that were not in the first sync. Not sure why that was, so I'll have to go through both sets of texts and delete the duplicated passages and notes while putting the rest together. Just thought I would add the additional anomaly to the description of this whole occurrence.

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8 hours ago, AnotherEvernoteUser said:

In deleting them from my phone, that MAY have triggered their appearance in the trash bin in my evernote PC, although the fact that they were merged leads me to believe that was from the action.

You are welcome.  Sometimes hard to reconstruct what we've done, but it is reasonably safe to say that if

  1. you merged notes on your PC and
  2. deleted notes on your phone and
  3. both platforms were synced,
  4. all the merged notes and the deleted notes would be in the trash notebook on both devices
8 hours ago, AnotherEvernoteUser said:

..But if these two pieces of information are true:

1. evernote does not replace all of the last sync with a new sync if the new sync is only partial and incomplete

2. evernote sends all synced deleted notes to the PC evernote trash bin

You may be making it more difficult than it is here.  :unsure: 

  1. Each time EN syncs what has not been synced.  You can tell which notes are going to sync by the * in the sync column of the PC or the colored up arrow on the phone.  If you have Instant Sync enabled on the PC and have a connection the syncs happen quickly.  If you have a connection the syncs on the phone happen right away.  Always best to force a sync when you start on a platform to catch updates from the other platform.  Always best to force a sync when you exit a platform to be sure all updates are sent to the server.
  2. All deleted notes get synced to the the trash bin (notebook) on all devices that you use.
8 hours ago, AnotherEvernoteUser said:

the second collection of notes that appeared merged as one weren't all new; it was a collection of SOME (not all) of the previously synced notes, as well as some other various notes that were not in the first sync.

Depending upon your settings, EN may have synced automatically multiple times during the time frame of your activity.  Check Tools - Options - Sync to see what the frequency is.

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7 hours ago, csihilling said:

You are welcome.  Sometimes hard to reconstruct what we've done, but it is reasonably safe to say that if

  1. you merged notes on your PC and
  2. deleted notes on your phone and
  3. both platforms were synced,
  4. all the merged notes and the deleted notes would be in the trash notebook on both devices

You may be making it more difficult than it is here.  :unsure:

I think you're right, convolution aside I think that one fact (anything deleted off of my phone will also be synced in my PC evernote and appear in that trash bin) should be enough. I deleted them all off of my phone, so whatever may or may not have been synced also ended up in my trash bin. I know that I saved and exported ALL of my notes from my trash bin, therefore I should have all my notes. It got a bit odd because of how I did it with syncing and merging and deleting all in the same few minutes, but the bottom line should be that it should all still be there in my exports! Greatly relieved, that was months and months of random creative ideas and work that can't just be reproduced in a linear effort of sitting down and doing it, because I wouldn't know what I had even said and what was lost! From now on I will take much, MUCH more care when handling these things. I'm glad that I at least learned a bit more about how EN functions and how to use it more appropriately. I can't actually express in words how much this means to me-I didn't want to add that drama-but I really can't thank you enough for your help, you just made my month!

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