Offline Notebooks take Forever to Download

[Pep Rosenfeld 9]

I'm working on an Android Samsung Galaxy S7 (with 8GB RAM, so a fast device). I  marked five notebooks to be downloaded, and days later they are not nearly downloaded. They have a lot of notes, yes, but this is a LONG wait. This was never a problem with the old build.

Is there a trick to downloading the notes? I need them offline for when I'm on a plane (a rare occurrence these days, but it happens!).

Thanks,

Pep Rosenfeld 

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Set the automatic lockscreen to never, open the EN app and keep it in the foreground. If necessary plug it into the charger. Let the download run. The download of 19GB to my iPhone took appr. half a day - maybe let it run at night.

It will only load when the app is in use, or at least open and active. Usually the loading of new stuff is pretty fast.

[Pep Rosenfeld 9]

Thanks! I'm trying as we speak... but it's still taking a long while.

[Pep Rosenfeld 9]

A day later and it worked 100%. Thanks!

[s2sailor 2,204]

Downloading does seem faster but is still a problem for me on a large 7000ish notebook.  The app crashes before the download completes and then becomes unstable requiring a reinstall.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Maybe put another nickel into the side slot of your phone every 30min while it is loading ... 🤓

Sorry, no idea. My largest single notebook is approaching 1.500 notes now, everything working so far.

Tried support on this ?

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Edit to that very large notebook: It seems the offline download may be not able to handle very large single notebooks.

As a workaround open a second notebook as archive for the first one, and move a part of the notes there.

[Alxa 480]

Hi to you all folks, and happy new year. I just installed EN 10.23.1 on another device and was faced again with stuck offline notebook download. 3 notebooks, all together around 20 notes. Only the frequent stuff. EN8.13. did this in seconds. I could not believe they did not fix this bug, which we saw since the very 10.0 - 13 months ago. I opened a ticket again, and guess what... they are still working on a fix.... well the exact same answer as with my original ticket 11 months ago...

As the even are not capable to fix main paid features I more and more get the impression they really got stuck in their framework experiment. Very sad. 😞

[Akos_M 18]

On 1/3/2022 at 9:33 PM, Alxa said:

Hi to you all folks, and happy new year. I just installed EN 10.23.1 on another device and was faced again with stuck offline notebook download. 3 notebooks, all together around 20 notes. Only the frequent stuff. EN8.13. did this in seconds. I could not believe they did not fix this bug, which we saw since the very 10.0 - 13 months ago. I opened a ticket again, and guess what... they are still working on a fix.... well the exact same answer as with my original ticket 11 months ago...

As the even are not capable to fix main paid features I more and more get the impression they really got stuck in their framework experiment. Very sad. 😞

Yes, annoyingly they still haven't fixed it. I also had several discussion with them about this. I still cannot fathom how they are unable to fix this issue when it has been highlighted numerous times. They also seem to forget that some users are paying for a feature which doesn't work at this point basically. It's really frustrating.

And to make matters worse, ever since the latest update, it takes even more time to load older notes on mobile on Android. Sometimes i have to wait literally a minute till a note loads.

[AnttiK 0]

Evernote has deliberately mislead its existing and potential customers with the ”offline access” feature in Evernote’s fraudulent marketing ever since Evernote’s inception (probably a decade ago or so). They have done absolutely nothing to fix this issue over the years, and the ”solutions” they suggest at Evernote Support (and that can be read on these boards as well) are nothing short of absurd. I have other apps on my iPad and iPhone (Navionics map/navigation app, for example) that download several gigabytes of data for offline use in some 30-60 minutes, and this can be done over wifi or cellular connection. There is no reason whatsoever why Evernote developers couldn’t make this possible.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

You are able to read ?

Does it say at any place "Will download so and so much content int his or that time" ?

No, it doesn't. It may not be super fast, but you can download even a large stock of notes in a few nightly sessions (when your device would anyhow just be sitting idle). My 7k+ took 3 night shifts to download, interrupted by my daily use of my devices. This is not absurd, but you must not follow that advise. If you want to hug your phone even at night, feel free, it just means offline download will take longer (to be honest, a LOT longer).

Since the initial download, the updating of the offline content happens while I use the app.

Personally I think EN tries to keep the devices cool and usable during download. Cool means not using the CPU power available, because it may create a thermal problem. They are not just downloading stuff, they need to build it into a local structure of metadata that is already in place, and create the local search index. You can see this performed by the grey/green status bars showing download progress per notebook.

The navigation app you mention will download a file, flat & easy. And an update means they download the whole thing again, flat & easy. EN to the contrary will sync every change made while offline back, in small increments that need to be processed as well.

It could be done faster, maybe, but they did not promise any speed they would now not reach.

[AnttiK 0]

4 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

You are able to read ?

Does it say at any place "Will download so and so much content int his or that time" ?

Yes, I can read. I’m an attorney. Let’s use basic analogy so you may understand:

A car manufacturer may not say or advertise anywhere that it takes dozens of hours or days to start the engine (or, for example, turn on the A/C), but you cannot escape the fact that the car is fundamentally defective if it takes that long.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

You posted aggressively, you got an answer. I must not be happy with download speed either, but for what you usually throw on a mobile device, it will do.

There is another deficiency related to offline use that is more in the fine print (I only found out by accident): Search does NOT include the content of pdf attachments (and others) when offline. This even when the pdf has its own readable text layer and does not depend on the EN OCR.

Maybe this information is more important for your use case than the one timer with download.

[Alxa 480]

3 hours ago, AnttiK said:

Yes, I can read. I’m an attorney. Let’s use basic analogy so you may understand:

A car manufacturer may not say or advertise anywhere that it takes dozens of hours or days to start the engine (or, for example, turn on the A/C), but you cannot escape the fact that the car is fundamentally defective if it takes that long.

Exactly my point. EN on Android until 8.13.3 could download the offline notebooks lightning fast for years. Now with the new "ever better" product EN 10.X the download of the exact same notes lasts hours or days what was done in seconds or minutes before - and you have to force your screen to be on for the whole time. Otherwise nothing is downloaded.  If evolving means pulling the brakes hard, that is simply ridiculous. The whole offline design seems to be a programming failure, since 10.0 - 13 months - exactly none development on that. Clearly shows they don't care about the paying customers... 😞