Note version conflicts, how do you address them?

[lotsa_notes 7]

Has anyone encountered a note version conflict? That is to say, you're working on a note, and suddenly at the top of the screen, Evernote alerts you that it's found another version of the note you're working on?

At a fundamental level, I get it - working on "cloud documents," if you've made an edit in a file from one device, and also edit it from another, and you've got two edits of the doc and neither is committed, then you have to figure out what version to keep.

My question is: is there any way that Evernote can tell you what the differences are between the notes?

For me, all I could figure out was to bring up both copies of notes side-by-side, and do a visual comparison.

Unfortunately, this file happened to be a long running log of notes, so it was a lot of visual comparisons.

 

Is there a better way to do this? Thanks in advance.

 

[PinkElephant 8,198]

If it is plain text: Select ALL in both notes and copy each to a text file, like MS Word or a free competitor as LibreOffice or OpenOffice.

They have tools to compare 2 text files and mark all differences.

Decide about what to keep, select all in the resulting text file and copy it back to EN.

To avoid many conflicts keep your notes short. Split long notes into several smaller ones. Create a TOC note and insert links from one note to another to make navigation easier.

[lotsa_notes 7]

Thanks @PinkElephant, much appreciated. I was hoping that Evernote might provide a method of doing that. comparison, but this certainly works.

[PinkElephant 8,198]

EN is doing what I expect them to do: Stop note conflicts to appear.

With the current design, AFAIK it can't be entirely avoided, because the complete note is treated as an entity.

As a contrast Things 3 just switched to a granular design, where each component of a task is treated as an information entity. There it is possible to let several clients make changes to the same task at the same time, because each little element can be blocked and liberated independently. One can for example change the title of a task when at the same time another changes the due date. Both will sync independently, no conflict arises.

I don't expect EN to introduce something like this any time soon - it would mean changing the whole data structure.