Deleting Notebooks

[emski.vet@gmail.com 0]

I have, depressingly and annoyingly, accidentally deleted a Notebook on two occasions by hitting the wrong button in the drop down menu (eg delete instead of rename). Is it possible to make it so when you attempt to delete a Notebook it asks you 'are you sure?'

I had to go into the trash and click on several dozen notes, individually restore them (would be so much easier if you could CTRL+ multiple notes) and then go on my phone to individually move them all to where they should be because I couldn't drag and drop anything on my desktop (I later learned via your website you could drag things into stacks when you switched to an older version of Evernote.....why would you change that?? Dragging and dropping is the best!).  I LOVE Evernote, but things like that are really annoying and waste sooooo much time!!

Thanks for your time.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,959]

Hi, and welcome to the forums. This is primarily a user-to-user place, and not an effective way of addressing Evernote staff directly (though they do at least look through the threads).

That does sound like a good idea! The best move would probably be to go to the Windows Evernote feedback/suggestions forum and post it there.

[jefito 5,589]

10 hours ago, emski.vet@gmail.com said:

I have, depressingly and annoyingly, accidentally deleted a Notebook on two occasions by hitting the wrong button in the drop down menu (eg delete instead of rename). Is it possible to make it so when you attempt to delete a Notebook it asks you 'are you sure?

In the Windows client, when I right-clicked on a notebook and selected "Delete...", I got an "Are you sure?" dialog, and no option to stop seeing it:

[jefito 5,589]

10 hours ago, emski.vet@gmail.com said:

I had to go into the trash and click on several dozen notes, individually restore them (would be so much easier if you could CTRL+ multiple notes) and then go on my phone to individually move them all to where they should be because I couldn't drag and drop anything on my desktop (I later learned via your website you could drag things into stacks when you switched to an older version of Evernote.....why would you change that?? Dragging and dropping is the best!).  I LOVE Evernote, but things like that are really annoying and waste sooooo much time!!

This makes no sense to me. I can freely drag notes to other notebooks in the Windows desktop. In fact, that's how I populated a new notebook that I then tried to delete, in my example above. Oh, and you can multi-select (Ctrl+click and Shift+click) notes in the note list, even in the trash, in the Windows application. When you do that, you get a panel that allows you to move them en masse to a different notebook. Or you can drag them as well.

Note that you cannot drag notes into stacks, because stacks do not contain notes; they only contain notebooks. You've never been able to do this in the Windows application. You can drag notebooks into (and out of) stacks. How do I know this? I just tried it and it works, just as it has for some years now.

 

[Don Dz 165]

11 hours ago, emski.vet@gmail.com said:

I have, depressingly and annoyingly, accidentally deleted a Notebook on two occasions by hitting the wrong button in the drop down menu (eg delete instead of rename). Is it possible to make it so when you attempt to delete a Notebook it asks you 'are you sure?'

As already mentioned above, "Are you sure?" is already a feature. 

If you have enabled Snap to ("Automatically move pointer to the default button in a dialog box"), then just one too many clicks can easily defeat any "Are you sure" feature.  If your problem happens too often, you could try disabling this mouse feature in the Control Panel.

[EdH 1,670]

I don't think you are deleting notebooks. As others have noted, when you delete, it asks for a confirm. Furthermore, when you delete a notebook, it is permenant, and all notes, even those in the trash, are purged forever, so they wouldn't be there to restore.

[jefito 5,589]

17 hours ago, EdH said:

I don't think you are deleting notebooks. As others have noted, when you delete, it asks for a confirm. Furthermore, when you delete a notebook, it is permenant, and all notes, even those in the trash, are purged forever, so they wouldn't be there to restore.

I don't think that that's true. I just now verified it (in the Windows beta 2, FWIW).

I set up a test notebook, moved some dummy notes into it, and synced. Then I deleted the notebook; got the "Are you sure message" as above and synced again. True to the message above, the notes were moved to the Trash. You can find them using the "Deleted" date, which you can add to a list view and then sort by it. If you click on a deleted note, in the note preview, you get an "Erase Note" button and a "Restore Note"button. "Erase Note" will purge the note, "Restore Note" will move the note to your default notebook (as far as I can tell). If you multi-select, then you can move them to whatever notebook you wish. It does seem as through the deleted notebook name is not retained, but you can always recreate it. However, the notes in that notebook are not automatically purged forever; you need to do that yourself.

[EdH 1,670]

46 minutes ago, jefito said:

I don't think that that's true. I just now verified it (in the Windows beta 2, FWIW).

I set up a test notebook, moved some dummy notes into it, and synced. Then I deleted the notebook; got the "Are you sure message" as above and synced again. True to the message above, the notes were moved to the Trash. You can find them using the "Deleted" date, which you can add to a list view and then sort by it. If you click on a deleted note, in the note preview, you get an "Erase Note" button and a "Restore Note"button. "Erase Note" will purge the note, "Restore Note" will move the note to your default notebook (as far as I can tell). If you multi-select, then you can move them to whatever notebook you wish. It does seem as through the deleted notebook name is not retained, but you can always recreate it. However, the notes in that notebook are not automatically purged forever; you need to do that yourself.

They must have changed it at some point in the past. I just verified what you did. It used to be if you deleted a notebook in Windows, it would permanently delete all notes in the notebook and those in the trash associated with that notebook, because they seemed to really still be in that notebook, just marked for deletion.

[jefito 5,589]

17 minutes ago, EdH said:

They must have changed it at some point in the past.

Oh, pshaw... that'd be a first...  

I can't really say if/when it changed, but it didn't seem right that the notes would be purged forever so it seemed worth a test. This way is better, though retaining the original notebook would be helpful. I didn't previously know about the deleted date, so I even learned something there.

[CalS 5,280]

10 minutes ago, jefito said:

I didn't previously know about the deleted date, so I even learned something there.

Look at you, leave the cloister of snippet view for a sec and learning happens!!!   

[jefito 5,589]

1 minute ago, CalS said:

Look at you, leave the cloister of snippet view for a sec and learning happens!!!   

It's less a matter of leaving snippet view, which I do occasionally for other purposes (it's not as though lists are some kind of rough neighborhood, after all) -- it's just that I don't delete things all that often, so not much need to go trawling around in the dank basement of my castoff notes. No feat, though -- I retreated to the safety and comfort of my beloved snippet view in short order...  

[EdH 1,670]

1 hour ago, jefito said:

Oh, pshaw... that'd be a first...  

I can't really say if/when it changed, but it didn't seem right that the notes would be purged forever so it seemed worth a test. This way is better, though retaining the original notebook would be helpful. I didn't previously know about the deleted date, so I even learned something there.

Don't get hung up on that Deleted date. I have 838 notes in my trash can, and the deleted date only goes through Jan 24, 2019. Anything before that has an empty deleted date. Maybe it only keeps 90 days of "deleted dates" in that field???

Whatever the issue is, that has been around for a long time. 

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,959]

17 hours ago, EdH said:

Don't get hung up on that Deleted date. I have 838 notes in my trash can, and the deleted date only goes through Jan 24, 2019. Anything before that has an empty deleted date. Maybe it only keeps 90 days of "deleted dates" in that field???

Whatever the issue is, that has been around for a long time. 

Interesting. Now that you mention it, I checked and I have deleted dates back to 1/1/2018. Weirdly, after that there are several notes created this year, and therefore deleted this year, but with no deleted date showing. Anyway, this stimulates me to do some Trash purging. If I deleted it over a year ago, odds are I'm never going to want it back.

[EdH 1,670]

4 minutes ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Interesting. Now that you mention it, I checked and I have deleted dates back to 1/1/2018. Weirdly, after that there are several notes created this year, and therefore deleted this year, but with no deleted date showing. Anyway, this stimulates me to do some Trash purging. If I deleted it over a year ago, odds are I'm never going to want it back.

It may also be that notes deleted on other platforms (mac, web, mobile) aren't adding the date either, but I know some of the deleted notes missing dates in my trash were definitely deleted on Windows, so at some point, it removes/loses them.  🤷‍♂️

[MatS14 19]

So, when you try to delete a notebook, this comes up, it doesn't say it will delete all the notes, but you know that it will. ( Common Sense ) :

You press delete, then when you look at the notebooks, it says trash right below it:

Click that, then you can just hold your cursor on "Restore" and keep on clicking until they are all restored:

 

Or, you could just make a new Notebook, and move the notes from one to the other, then delete one, or just rename the notebook:

 

You have no Idea how long it takes me to edit these pics to help you.  😊

 

[PinkElephant 8,115]

Nice job !

When I decide to post edited screen shots, I do the editing on my iPad with Apple Pencil. Works fast & gets the job done 😎

[CalS 5,280]

12 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

Nice job !

When I decide to post edited screen shots, I do the editing on my iPad with Apple Pencil. Works fast & gets the job done 😎

The built in EN annotator is good enough for a neanderthal like myself...  

[PinkElephant 8,115]

Yes, sure it is, but I would rather avoid to project the EN screen to the caves walls ... the humidity will kill the gadgets before you’re done.

[CalS 5,280]

14 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Yes, sure it is, but I would rather avoid to project the EN screen to the caves walls ... the humidity will kill the gadgets before you’re done.