Total Note Counts Different Across All Devices

[FunkyPlaid 22]

I'm re-posting this issue that I've seen pop up again and again on these forums going all the way back to 2014, and nobody seems to have a definitive explanation or an answer for what's causing the discrepancy between note counts across devices. Any official responses I've seen have been "known bug" claims, but this is something that hundreds of users have been mentioning for a very long time and it's still not fixed or explained. Some users have offered their takes, but none that I've seen have solved the problem.

Simply put, the total note counts don't match up across any of my devices or versions of Evernote. I'd really, really like to know why. I'd also really like to know if I can be totally confident that the notes I create on one device are successfully syncing with my Evernote account and broadcasting to all of my other devices. That's what we're told should be happening and that's what I'd ideally want from a note-syncing service for which I pay a regular subscription fee. I don't want to have to run tagging experiments to see what I'm missing from what device, because clean and accurate syncing is what the service is supposed to provide – and what it promises that it provides.

My disparate totals are as follows:

Evernote Web: 5433
Evernote Legacy Mac: 5819
Evernote 10 Mac: 5599
Evernote iOS: 5582
Evernote iPadOS: 5794

It shouldn't be an issue with shared notes or notebooks, as all shared notes should still be accessible from the account no matter the device, both incoming and outgoing shares. It's not a Trash issue, and it's not an identifiable setting like offline downloaded notebooks on different devices. I'm especially concerned about the c.300 missing notes between 10 and Legacy on the same desktop computer.

Would someone on the Evernote team please explain what this is all about? If it's still a bug or known issue, why has this not been taken care of in the seven years it's been flagged repeatedly? If there's a reason, would you please let us know? It seems to me that this should be a baseline functionality that needs to be shored up and explained before any further bells and whistles are added to the next iteration of the service.

Thanks for any information you can offer, but please offer something if you can.

[Rajesh Gaire 22]

9 minutes ago, FunkyPlaid said:

I'm re-posting this issue that I've seen pop up again and again on these forums going all the way back to 2014, and nobody seems to have a definitive explanation or an answer for what's causing the discrepancy between note counts across devices. Any official responses I've seen have been "known bug" claims, but this is something that hundreds of users have been mentioning for a very long time and it's still not fixed or explained. Some users have offered their takes, but none that I've seen have solved the problem.

Simply put, the total note counts don't match up across any of my devices or versions of Evernote. I'd really, really like to know why. I'd also really like to know if I can be totally confident that the notes I create on one device are successfully syncing with my Evernote account and broadcasting to all of my other devices. That's what we're told should be happening and that's what I'd ideally want from a note-syncing service for which I pay a regular subscription fee. I don't want to have to run tagging experiments to see what I'm missing from what device, because clean and accurate syncing is what the service is supposed to provide – and what it promises that it provides.

My disparate totals are as follows:

Evernote Web: 5433
Evernote Legacy Mac: 5819
Evernote 10 Mac: 5599
Evernote iOS: 5582
Evernote iPadOS: 5794

It shouldn't be an issue with shared notes or notebooks, as all shared notes should still be accessible from the account no matter the device, both incoming and outgoing shares. It's not a Trash issue, and it's not an identifiable setting like offline downloaded notebooks on different devices. I'm especially concerned about the c.300 missing notes between 10 and Legacy on the same desktop computer.

Would someone on the Evernote team please explain what this is all about? If it's still a bug or known issue, why has this not been taken care of in the seven years it's been flagged repeatedly? If there's a reason, would you please let us know? It seems to me that this should be a baseline functionality that needs to be shored up and explained before any further bells and whistles are added to the next iteration of the service.

Thanks for any information you can offer, but please offer something if you can.

wow this is a serious issue, i am shocked this has not been solved by now. I am quite new so i myself have not experienced this so i am not able to help. I can see your frustration, however have you tried taking a support ticket with Evernote, i understand that with Premium you get direct email support with them, even if this does not work there are ways to DM the Mod/staff in this forum/site so have a try and see. To warn it may take a few days for them to reply through here and much more through the support ticket. I will also like to see this issue resolved because this is very true:                                                                                                                                                                                     (also i would not like this to happen to anyone as well)

 

9 minutes ago, FunkyPlaid said:

I'd ideally want from a note-syncing service for which I pay a regular subscription fee. I don't want to have to run tagging experiments to see what I'm missing from what device, because clean and accurate syncing is what the service is supposed to provide – and what it promises that it provides.

some help @Shane D. or any staff memeber.

you can also directly Dm shane if you want @FunkyPlaid

Edited January 25, 2021 by Rajesh Gaire
grammer

[PinkElephant 8,115]

No big thrill, just needs a bit of housekeeping (at least it did for me):

All legacies on desktop: Run their own data base on the device, and count this data. If there were syncing issues in the past, there can be a difference to the server. To solve it, hold down alt/opt (Mac) or ctrl (Win) before clicking on the help menu. There will be additional options to repair the data base. Pick one after the other, just make sure the prior one had time to run before choosing the next. There is no message when done, so just give it some time. As a last resort you can force a sync with the server data (hold down opt/alt and shift, click on sync symbol).

All other clients: They rely on server data. So basically there can’t be a difference. However I found one reason: Shared notebooks or notes. Especially after upgrading to v10, shares send to me by other people had to be renewed. I used the work chat for those shares that were mentioned there. It may be difficult in case the note that came from a share has been deleted by its owner.

In case you can’t solve your issue yourself, contact support.

[FunkyPlaid 22]

5 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

No big thrill, just needs a bit of housekeeping (at least it did for me):

All legacies on desktop: Run their own data base on the device, and count this data. If there were syncing issues in the past, there can be a difference to the server. To solve it, hold down alt/opt (Mac) or ctrl (Win) before clicking on the help menu. There will be additional options to repair the data base. Pick one after the other, just make sure the prior one had time to run before choosing the next. There is no message when done, so just give it some time. As a last resort you can force a sync with the server data (hold down opt/alt and shift, click on sync symbol).

All other clients: They rely on server data. So basically there can’t be a difference. However I found one reason: Shared notebooks or notes. Especially after upgrading to v10, shares send to me by other people had to be renewed. I used the work chat for those shares that were mentioned there. It may be difficult in case the note that came from a share has been deleted by its owner.

In case you can’t solve your issue yourself, contact support.

I appreciate your response, but it doesn’t look like you read the details of my post. It’s not appearing as a shared notebook issue for me and forcing sync doesn’t solve the discrepancies. There are c.400 fewer notes on the server as on my desktop clients, and neither version matches with the server or each other. Can’t do housekeeping when the doors are all locked, and we shouldn’t have to.

[PinkElephant 8,115]

Yes, I read it.

On the desktops, I can just repeat that you have an own data base that is counted. If you accumulated mistakes in this data base (which happened to me as well, while using the app), the counter will go wrong, counting shadow copies or dead data base entries. This is the reason why there are housekeeping tools build into the legacy clients.

Further the legacy clients AFAIK don’t have the sharing problem.

On all server based clients, my personal experience (and this is what I have shared with you) is that all differences were related to notes or notebooks shared to me by other people. Once I cleaned this out, note count it on the spot.

This forum is about sharing experience. This is my experience, and from the short time it took you to answer I am pretty sure you didn’t even try. It is up to you if you want to apply it - I learned my way by simply testing the options when I had a search problem, as well related to some bad data base entries.

Or try support, if you want an official contact with EN. Return time of my last tickets was below 24h.

[FunkyPlaid 22]

21 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Yes, I read it.

On the desktops, I can just repeat that you have an own data base that is counted. If you accumulated mistakes in this data base (which happened to me as well, while using the app), the counter will go wrong, counting shadow copies or dead data base entries. This is the reason why there are housekeeping tools build into the legacy clients.

Further the legacy clients AFAIK don’t have the sharing problem.

On all server based clients, my personal experience (and this is what I have shared with you) is that all differences were related to notes or notebooks shared to me by other people. Once I cleaned this out, note count it on the spot.

This forum is about sharing experience. This is my experience, and from the short time it took you to answer I am pretty sure you didn’t even try. It is up to you if you want to apply it - I learned my way by simply testing the options when I had a search problem, as well related to some bad data base entries.

Or try support, if you want an official contact with EN. Return time of my last tickets was below 24h.

Thank you for sharing your experiences and your suggestions.

[PinkElephant 8,115]

Good luck - I had a bad feeling as well when it happened to me, because you always doubt if search & retrieval would be reliable if note count is off. With running the help-functions and getting the shares fixed, it is 100% accurate (for me).

[gazumped 11,666]

Just as a general comment:  this isn't one issue that has been going on for several years - given the changes in devices, operating systems, browsers and Evernote over that period,  no single issue could survive that long.  There are occasionally problems with different note counts,  but entirely due to corrupted notes / interrupted comms / local (unsynced) notebooks [which used to be a thing before v10] - and even,  from time to time,  user error.  It's just part of having notes available wherever you are - it's 99% reliable,  but sometimes there are glitches.

[Rajesh Gaire 22]

21 hours ago, gazumped said:

Just as a general comment:  this isn't one issue that has been going on for several years - given the changes in devices, operating systems, browsers and Evernote over that period,  no single issue could survive that long.  There are occasionally problems with different note counts,  but entirely due to corrupted notes / interrupted comms / local (unsynced) notebooks [which used to be a thing before v10] - and even,  from time to time,  user error.  It's just part of having notes available wherever you are - it's 99% reliable,  but sometimes there are glitches.

 

21 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

Good luck - I had a bad feeling as well when it happened to me, because you always doubt if search & retrieval would be reliable if note count is off. With running the help-functions and getting the shares fixed, it is 100% accurate (for me).

Thanks for your help guys but do you know how to fix the note discrepancies between non legacy version as @FunkyPlaid is suffering from that as well. also the local notebooks should not be a problem because en(new) already searches for those and even if it missed it will pick then up again, and again if it didn't do that you can manually do that by changing one line in a json file, therefore i don't think that local notebooks are the problem. however it may be for the legacy that you @PinkElephant are right but he will still have the issue for the non legacy version. i know what you are saying @gazumped when i used the legacy version and made notes they took a long time to sync to the non legacy devices. However the courrupted notes should not be a problem for non legacy version because en has made it so it will copy the note and delete the corrupted, it will do so as well if it thinks it may be corrupted in the future, due to this there was a bug that by mistake made too many copies of the file, which is now fixed. 

[PinkElephant 8,115]

In my case the main difference came from notes and notebooks shared to me from others. These shares all had to be renewed.

Corrupted notes I only had twice, pre iOS 10.2. Fortunately I got them purged, so no issue for me. But sure, if a note gets stuck on one device, will not sync, can’t be deleted, it will probably make a bad count as well.

In my case it took a complete uninstall with dumping all data, then switching the i-device off, on, reinstall, login, sync. After that one note was gone, another could then be deleted.

[Rajesh Gaire 22]

yes, @PinkElephant i was thinking of suggesting that he uninstall all versions and clear data then reinstall them to see if it fixes it but i felt that if this was a issue with notes rather than a display bug then he could lose notes, and these could be important notes and that would be not ideal for anyone especially when you have a large amount of notes then you would only know that you have lost a note when you come to need the note, the best advice then would be for @FunkyPlaid  to get a support ticket with EN and hopefully it solves it.

[PinkElephant 8,115]

Yes, a ticket is not a bad idea.

In general if a note gets stuck on import on an iOS device, the content is gone for good. iOS is heavily sandboxed, and there is no way to access these buffers between sandboxes (which is the function of sandboxing, to isolate apps from each other).

So it is uninstall, dump all data, switch the device off to clean out the memory, and start anew. Some even promote a forced reset of the iOS device, which I never had to do, but might be necessary:

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/force-restart-iphone-iph8903c3ee6/ios