Urgh... All Reminders Deleted - any way to restore?

[aukirk 367]

I am a heavy user of Reminders, and have been searching for ways to perfect the ways to manage and update those reminders for a while.   In that process, I previously used the Cronofy Evernote Calendar Integration, and had the reminders display on my calendar, and would use that to move/defer reminders.

However, over the past several weeks, I have been using the RemembersTheMilk integration and really like that.  Since I no longer use the calendar integration, I went ahead and "deleted" that calendar from Outlook yesterday.... then today... discovered that ALL of my reminders set before I deleted that calendar are now GONE.

In hindsight this was a terribly foolish way to handle, and I should have revoked access to the Cronofy extension first... It appears that deleting the shared calendar essentially deleted all of the calendar items, which the Cronofy extension interprets as removing the reminder from a note.  

Does anyone know a way to see my list of reminders BEFORE I did this?  All of the notes are still there, but they do not have the reminder dates.  This is a major headache.  Anyone have any helpful suggestions (other than going through all of my notes modified in the past few months to try to remember what needs a reminder)?

[DTLow 5,736]

19 minutes ago, aukirk said:

Anyone have any helpful suggestions

Sorry; nothing on the Evernote side unless you have backups
Can you do anything on the Outlook side?

[gazumped 11,664]

Ouch - it's useful to know that sort of two-way linking has a downside,  but sorry that you had to lose a lot of history to find out - I don't know whether an old system backup would have useful data from Outlook or your Evernote database,  but per @DTLow I doubt Evernote will be able to help.  Couldn't hurt to contact Support though - maybe they can suggest something.

[aukirk 367]

Yeah, I reached out to support to see if they can at least generate a list of note titles and reminder dates from some backup.   I do have an email that is sent to me automatically everyday containing the contents of a Filterize table of contents for all reminders in the next 7 days (which used to be my method of tracking reminders)... Therefore, at least I can recreate the ones over the next week.

Unfortunately, those reminders I set for weeks or months in the future are the big unknown that is going to haunt me.  But I guess if Evernote can't pull something like that I will just look through all notes over the next week and hopefully seeing the titles will prompt me to remember anything I set future reminders for (or at least catch the important ones).

It seems likely this is just going to be a hard lesson learned about being careful when activating/deactivating anything that has ability to change the Evernote data.... 

[CalS 5,280]

7 hours ago, aukirk said:

I am a heavy user of Reminders, and have been searching for ways to perfect the ways to manage and update those reminders for a while.   In that process, I previously used the Cronofy Evernote Calendar Integration, and had the reminders display on my calendar, and would use that to move/defer reminders.

However, over the past several weeks, I have been using the RemembersTheMilk integration and really like that.  Since I no longer use the calendar integration, I went ahead and "deleted" that calendar from Outlook yesterday.... then today... discovered that ALL of my reminders set before I deleted that calendar are now GONE.

In hindsight this was a terribly foolish way to handle, and I should have revoked access to the Cronofy extension first... It appears that deleting the shared calendar essentially deleted all of the calendar items, which the Cronofy extension interprets as removing the reminder from a note.  

Does anyone know a way to see my list of reminders BEFORE I did this?  All of the notes are still there, but they do not have the reminder dates.  This is a major headache.  Anyone have any helpful suggestions (other than going through all of my notes modified in the past few months to try to remember what needs a reminder)?

Got a recent backup somewhere?

[aukirk 367]

14 hours ago, CalS said:

Got a recent backup somewhere?

Not sure why I didn't think of this immediately, but realized that I do have a version of Evernote loaded on a computer that I hadn't used in about a month... so YES.  

I was able to use that computer (with internet turned off to prevent syncing) and see a list of all those random reminders set far off in the future, and set my mind at ease by resetting all of those items that did not jump out when I skimmed through my lengthy "All Notes" list this weekend.

Thanks for the help.... I will definitely be more carefully with any enabling/disabling any connected accounts from now on.

[gazumped 11,664]

1 hour ago, aukirk said:

I was able to use that computer (with internet turned off to prevent syncing) and see a list of all those random reminders set far off in the future

You are a steely-eyed techy person.  Glad you found your data.  😊

[CalS 5,280]

2 hours ago, aukirk said:

Thanks for the help.... I will definitely be more carefully with any enabling/disabling any connected accounts from now on.

You are welcome.  Glad it is sorted.  You might consider creating periodic backups using the ENEX format.  Just in case....