(Archived) Bug: "Items cannot be deleted from attributes."

[tobym 0]

Whenever I try to sync, I get this error "Items cannot be deleted from attributes.". This is Evernote for mac, Version 1.9.0 (83438) on OS 10.6.3. If I try to quit the application, it throws the same error, and warns me "Could not save changes while quitting. Quit anyway?" with the options "cancel" or "Quit anyway". Not wanting to lose the new notes I entered, I haven't quit yet. I did select all my notes and exported them, so I am pretty sure I could just risk it and re-import if necessary, but I'm not 100% sure.

I might have caused this error somehow when I quickly added a notebook (a synchronized one) and deleted it immediately after. Not exactly sure, since I didn't get the error until trying to sync or quit.

[engberg 89]

It sounds like your local database may be corrupted, but there may be more information under: Help > Activity Log...

[tobym 0]

Yes, it looks like adding and deleting the synced notebook caused the error. Do you want the log file for debugging?

I quit Evernote and reopened it. The latest two notes were missing (I was warned about this before quitting, as mentioned in the OP). However I had exported those notes successfully before quitting. So, I imported those notes. I was surprised that importing notes just creates a new notebook with all the notes instead of attempting to synchronize anything. Anyway, since I knew which notes were missing, I just copied those from the Imported notebook by their proper synced notebooks, and deleted the import notebook. So no data loss in the end, which is good.

Small side bug though: when you delete note the count in the title menu and under the NOTEBOOKS header in the left sidebar do not update. The only part that does update correctly is the search bar region which says "Viewing notes from (All Notebooks)".

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I might have caused this error somehow when I quickly added a notebook (a synchronized one) and deleted it immediately after.

I'm on PC but have had some funky things happen when doing multiple things to the same note(s) or notebook. (But not your exact problem.) It's no problem moving say, many notes from one notebook to another or renaming a notebook, since those are "single step" thingies. But if I create a notebook, add a couple of notes to it, then want to move the notes to a different notebook & delete the newly created notebook, all within a span of 5 or 10 minutes, I'll do it in phases. IE, I'll leave the notes in the newly created notebook for a couple of sync cycles. Then I'll move them to the notebook where I want them & leave it that way for a couple of sync cycles. Then I'll delete the newly created notebook.

[engberg 89]

The sync protocol shouldn't ever result in this kind of low-level database corruption ... i.e. you shouldn't be able to do anything in our UI that breaks the database like this. So it's a bug.

If you're still having problems, you may need to move and recreate your database from a fresh sync.

[tobym 0]

engberg: after quitting and restarting (and manually re-importing the unsaved notes), I have not had any further issues. Based on the log, it seems very very likely that the create/delete process caused the problem. Again, happy to provide logs if you want them.