Text not saved in local note

[brownstudy 7]

Using an iPhone SE (1st gen), iOS 15.4, and whatever the latest EN version is (I set apps to auto-update in the background). Used over very fast wifi.

I typed in a long note on the phone last night, one of those classic light bulb of inspiration notes. I set the phone down, picked it up a few minutes later, woke the phone, went to the note, and over half of it was gone. So i retyped what I could remember, set the phone down without putting it to sleep so the note would save. Picked it up again a few minutes later, and again, over half of the note was gone. (If only there was a way to sync the note immediately or at least save it locally in its current state.)

Checked note history in Windows Evernote and it barely recorded a quarter of what I wrote.

I filed a support ticket. I expect the workaround is to use iOS Evernote for viewing only and instead use Apple Notes when on mobile. And to rub salt into the wound, I just last week upgraded to Professional.

The other issue I have with Evernote on ipad and iphone is that notes stop syncing after a while. The only workarounds are 1) restart the device or 2) delete and reinstall the app. I'm frustrated with having to use workarounds so the app will perform its most basic function. Fortunately, the Windows desktop app seems to be mostly solid apart from duplicating notes every so often.

[PinkElephant 8,077]

Wanna sync ?

On mobile: Go to settings, synchronization, sync now.

Done …

Usually the app will keep a note even when not synced. But it may be iOS force closed the app because of (in the evening) a low running battery.

[brownstudy 7]

Thank you for that Sync Now tip; did not think to check Settings when I wanted to sync an individual note. It's not convenient at all, but will get the job done.

The phone was at about 90% battery at the time, so that is not an issue. Perhaps I need to adjust the iOS Auto-lock from 1m to 3m so EN has time to sync in the background.

[PinkElephant 8,077]

To get a sync initiated, you can as well pull the left panel down a little with a finger, and let it go. But the settings option is more secure.

Putting in a longer autolockscreen-time is a good idea as well. 

Apple hat this battery thing a while ago, where phones switched themselves off when you started a battery hungry app (like the camera). They got religious about conserving battery - they are very rigid about shutting down apps in the background.

[mark.betteridge 2]

This week I decided to take advantage of the Google calender integration on Evernote to make some notes at a conference I was attending on my iphone... 
I opened the app, selected the appointment and cretaed a note and then started jotting down notes. Only to realise that everytime my phone screen shutdown and I reopened the note that at least 50% of my added content would disapear. This started a futile circle of me trying to remember what I had written and retyping it only to miss what was actually being said in the presentations..... After the third fail, I gave up and switched to making an Apple Note. The Apple Note worked successfully. When the phone switched off and I woke it back up, what I had written was still there.

Having read the above, I have to say it has reinforced my fear that Evernote is just not usable when out and about. I love Evernote and use it daily at my desk, but if I can't easily use this in a real-life meeting (i.e. not at my home desk) then Evernote will always be a filing cabinet and not a truly useful ecosystem.

I am conscious this is a rant and I have nothing to offer as a solution, but havign to 'go back to the menu and forcing a synch' everytime I pause making a note is not a good user workflow or experience. So either I am doing something very wrong or this needs some better product and tech thinking to make it useful.
 

[PinkElephant 8,077]

On which client version are you ? 

[Dasklein 0]

SAME thing happened to me @brownstudy... lost A TON of written notes. Shocking that Evernote does not save local drafts of notes on iOS. Am I crazy or were drafts/autosaves a feature before?

user case: Had plenty of battery left, put phone down to look through a book, phone locks, and the whole note evaporates. 

PLEASE add some local drafts or autosave to iOS. Seems like baseline for a NOTE APP?! 

 

[PinkElephant 8,077]

You can’t loose „a ton of written notes“ by what you describe because the mobile client will only have one ( - 1 - ) note open at any given time.

Bad enough, but don’t exaggerate. „Alternative facts“ may be the dernier criu in some circles, but it does not help to sort things out.

On which EN iOS client are you ? There has been recent improvements on what happens when the lockscreen kicks in or you switch apps, so make sure you are updated.

And then there are bad news: iOS got pretty strict on allowing apps to run in the background, Apple wants to conserve battery power wherever possible. So iOS force quits apps that are running in the background - which the app itself can‘t prevent. If there is unsaved content on any app that iOS forces closed, this content is lost.

So better hit the green swash before leaving the app, to make sure your changes are saved. EN has a local memory which then keeps the content, so it is not necessary it has synced the change to the server. But if you keep the note open in edit mode, the last changes may not be saved when iOS decides to kick the app.

If you don’t like it, Apple support is a better place to vent your emotions about it.

[Dasklein 0]

@PinkElephant, my apologies for improper vernacular here. Semantics on technical terms, but no exaggeration... Yes, I had a single "Note File" open, but I did in-fact lose "a ton of written notes," within that note file, i.e., what Webster might call a "note": a brief record of facts, topics, or thoughts, written down as an aid to memory. 

And thank you for the note about iOS restrictions, that might allude to some changes, but what you describe should still be easily addressed in the world of hybrid cloud apps. Simple engineering solution is to cache locally every few seconds or at least cache within a time frame short of the default sleep/lock setting. Then cache to the cloud on some polled or heartbeat method. Not a new method, and done by most EN competitors, so I'm a bit shocked by the change or lack of feature. 

For clarity, I did not leave the app. I get switching apps may ditch changes, but some caching method should still get support that as well. I mean that EN should simply cache by the above methods knowing that iOS might quit after default times. Moreover, if EN wants to charge a premium in a mobile work environment, this seems like a pretty basic use case? iPad iOS is all about app switching, multi tasking and being the desktop "lite."

Or is this somehow user error on my part. A missing setting? I know iOS moves configs around all the time.

While not totally up on my iOS, I do work in product / software and would argue this is not an apple support issue at all. I have a dozen other apps that do this through a mix of local and cloud caching. EN is using a few hundred MB's on my phone, 117MB's of which iOS says are Documents & Data... just wish the 30-45 mins of notes I wrote on my device were in that, LOL. FWIW, I've been a paid EN user for over a decade, so pretty invested at this point, and maybe earned some space to "vent." 

EN 10.30.1, iOS 15.4.1

[PinkElephant 8,077]

Theoretically you can design any sort of safety net.

EN treats a note as an entity - it does not have a granular design like other, more modern apps employ. These apps save only the tiny little part of a note (or file) that really was changed. For EN it is the full note. This is why to be sure your data gets where it is safe, you need to save. It will write it to the local database then, and try to sync it with the server immediately or on the next chance.

But as long as a note is open in edit mode, changes are not saved. When you switch apps leaving it open in edit mode and iOS kicks in and closes the now backgrounded app, data is lost.

That is the current situation, like it or not.

The CEO of EN has announced they want to make a general overhaul of syncing this year. Maybe this will change the situation, and maybe not. We still don't know what they will do, so we can't tell at the moment.

Until we know better, save to be safe before switching apps on iOS.

[timmycomedy 14]

I can feel everyone’s total frustration here with the sync and vanishing text issue. I have the same issue and so do many users that I speak with and there’s even multiple people on this forum with the issue.  From what I have gathered today it’s on old iPhones and New iPhones, it’s on iPhone 7, iPhone 6, iPhone 12M, iPhone 11P, multiple iPads… older and newer OS versions.  And it’s been described by multiple people in multiple locations in multiple ways.  But in short: OS devices: iPhone and iPad and even the iMac Pro… all have sync and vanishing text issues.  There are many posts on the subject where I have elaborated technically.  So now…

I’ll tell you my story of how awful this ongoing issue was for me just recently:

I’m a comedian.  A comedic writer.  What I write and edit is my bread and butter.  Jokes are not simple to edit and it’s not easy to come up with new topics.  The way Evernote was helping me was that I could use the mobile app to jot down a joke the moment something happened or the moment an inspired joke came to me.  These moments are rare in short term timeframes.  The best ones may happen in beautiful streams of 10 great ideas or they may happen once a month.  The habit of the comedian is to MAKE SURE you write down the joke, the idea, or the odd moment IMMEDIATELY.  Once you have captured the joke, you can go home and edit on your Evernote and make it so much better.  Evernote using this habit had been my secret weapon.  That and watching tourists. 😂 

Just last week I had a rare moment.  I was out with friends and our dialog was some of the funniest back and forth I’ve had since before the pandemic.  As we were talking I started writing and couldn’t write fast enough.  It was a moment of pure inspiration!  I was so excited that I finally had a long burst of post-pandemic material that was so thick and detailed and real!  I couldn’t wait to get back home and edit the jokes.

I walked and left 23rd Street and got on the train back to Wall Street where I have my unusually small office.  Instead of heading home I just wanted to go to my office and finish this golden material.

By the time I switched trains at Union Square, I excitedly looked and even though Evernote was still open, it displayed the elephant logo and then the spinning icon (which happens all too often).  In the past this was no big deal.  It was just syncing on its own I guess.  But when the note reopened - most of it was gone.  My heart sank.  I felt like I had just lost a wallet or fell off a ledge onto the tracks.  I fearfully checked my other notes, opened and closed the app, checked my other phone - and it suddenly occurred to me: “Oh no… this is the sync issue - why did I write those in Evernote; on no - now it’s happened on something even more important!”  
 

I went back to my office and tried to access the history of the note, I closed my apps, I tried the “shake-the-iPhone” history technique - I must have tried 20 things one after another in panic.  Then I tried to write what I could remember into a new note on the Notes App, in a panic-rush of fear.  In this panic, it made it even harder to remember the jokes.  Or even the themes.  I called my friends who only were able to give some fractured ideas of what was discussed and most of those weren’t the ones I thought were fantastic.  Only a fraction of it remained.  It looks far less inspired.  My excitement was completely drained.
 

I also had that feeling in the emotion of the moment that I had “lost a ton of notes (meaning “text” - notes taken, not entire files, so I know what you mean).  And even though I may have salvaged one or two good bits partially, it hurt.  I feel every word of your pain.  I feel this disappointment. This is often felt so deeply by someone who writes VERY important notes (text) when it can never be fully recovered - those who understand how truly great Evernote was… and how badly this makes us feel right now: let down, crushed.  Friends who write lyrics, jokes, meeting logs, show ideas, innovations on OS versions are all hurting right now.  This is not my technical post, I’ve already posted plenty of those, trying to tie this same issue together through their multiple posts .:.but I echo the emotion of yours.

Losing text is very painful to anyone who is extremely reliant on every specific word.  So I understand because I too have “lost a ton of notes.”  Is it precisely a metric ton?  It is not.  Does it convey that I have lost at least 2,000 words of text so far, many extremely valuable phrases and sentences in the past month or more?  I hope it does.  And I feel your agony.

 

 

 

 

[PinkElephant 8,077]

You do not make it better by spreading the (more or less) same content all over the forum.

You show a problem with saving your new content locally, to the memory of your device. It has (from your video) nothing to do with syncing, which is device-server communication.

Why it takes so long to write a small amount of data to the memory of a device can’t be analyzed here, user2user. But this is the problem, and when you repeatedly hit the green swash again and again while it is working to save, you create the situation that something „vanishes“.

No, it does not vanish, it is overwritten by your own interaction with the ongoing saving. 

Try to sort this out with support. And stop messing up a local saving problem with syncing problems. There are syncing problems, but this does not look like one of them.

[timmycomedy 14]

You do not make it better by chastising anyone who adds their stories or data. Let’s keep the dialog friendly, we’re all in the same community here.

I’m here because support referred me directly here.  There is a ticket in, that’s how I got here.

I’m trying to *connect* similar issues (sync and vanishing text) with *specific* videos and information to show the *variety* of ways it happens, adding a new example each time, to add to the dialog and encourage others to also express specifics.  Discouraging others I feel is less helpful than sharing examples.

This is one quick video and one example of one method that text can vanish.  Thanks for the overwrite tip.

[PinkElephant 8,077]

What I observe is that you drop the same issue on a multitude of existing threads, without checking if your issue matches the ones originally posted.

This is what we call hijacking a thread, and it is against forum rules. Because many people read the last posts first, the original problem of the thread owner is pushed back by the hijacking posts. This is not fir for the thread owners, no for other users coming here searching for something.

If you have an issue, try to find a thread where it matches the description (you did so in the „3 pictures posted“ thread, perfectly fine), or open a new one.

About what you describe: We other users in the forum have rarely doubts that what a fellow user describes would be wrong. It may not match own experience, but this is no evidence something would not be there. If on a video even harder to debate (what we don’t do).

From experience there are problems the forum swarm intelligence can’t solve. I think this may be among them. If you have problems with support, you can come back, and we „regulars“ can try to bump it there.

[timmycomedy 14]

Ah, sorry I’m not a technical guy or forum poster typically so I thought similar meant helpful.  I’ll make sure to just post on this issue in my own specific forum post moving forum.  Just to close, here’s how that file looks now, which is bizarre to me - it’s neither the over written version nor the original.  It’s an example of missing text and how it appears later after I haven’t touched the file:

:

[PinkElephant 8,077]

For me it looks as if it took an intermediate saving status (part saved, part not) when the swash was hit again. It treated this as the original, and tried to save it again over the existing note. 

There can be several reasons, but hard to find out. A few questions: 

• How much free memory have you got on your iPhone ?
• What happens if you take the phone to flight mode, and try it again ? Faster ?
• Assuming a normal daily use (not taking many photos, for example): Do you need to recharge during the day ?

[timmycomedy 14]

Thanks!  So… Lots of memory, I keep a handheld charger so I never run low as I’m a continuous user.  I’m going to test long term and continue sending examples to support.  Hopefully they are helpful.  I was truly worried that others were universally having this issue but if not, then I’m baffled as it used to work on all devices just fine.  Honestly I was less careful in the past as well, because I’m not really a technical guy.  It was more robust before.  Whatever changed seems to have happened on both my iPads and my 3 iPhones.  Maybe Evernote saves to my iCloud now!?  That would explain the consistency.

[PinkElephant 8,077]

Memory looks good - before anything happens, you must be down to a few GB left.

But battery ? On my 11 Pro Max I hardly ever need to charge during the day. Mine is now running for nearly 20 hours, and I still have 36% left. What happens if you don’t charge ? 

The clock speed of the CPU depends on the voltage of the device, supplied by the battery. If it is running low, the CPU will run slow, and operations will be stalled. If it is on one device, it may be the battery is aged, or has a defect. Just a theory, but you find this more often than you imagine.

Many people think „My phone is getting old, I need a new one“, when they would just need a battery replacement. Or you had it in the pants pocket, forgot and have been sitting down, bending the battery. Or you had it in a bag, with other stuff laying on top, and it got a small dent. There are many ways to age or damage a battery. Again, just a theory.