Struggling with Offline Notebooks on Mobile Devices

[david_woznyorg 8]

Hello all,

I'm hoping someone can guide me a little on the use of "Offline notebooks" on my Android and iOS devices.  I'm a reasonably familiar user of EN - my main usage is the EN desktop app on Windows 10.

 

On both of my mobile devices, I've tried setting 'download all notebooks' and left the devices online overnight. I find that I occasionally have notes which aren't available when I access EN offline on the devices.  As a troubleshooting exercise, I chose to 'download selected notebooks' and ticked all of my notebooks - about ninety or so (see attached image).  I'm still finding in circumstances when I'm offline, that I occasionally don't have access to some notes I want on my mobile devices.  As a further troubleshooting exercise, on both devices I completely re-installed EN, but that hasn't overcome the problem.  I wonder if anyone has any insight into the best approach to achieving offline notebook confidence?

 

I do have a specific question... When I have clicked 'Download selected notebooks' - and ticked them all, I see a green line appearing underneath the names of some of the notebooks, perhaps about 20% of them.  Can anyone advise of what the green line is meant to indicate... on some the notebooks the green line is about 90% complete, with a 10% bit of grey on the right extreme.  My hunch would be that this is indicating that the notebook is not fully synched, but: a) I'm leaving the device alone to synch for a long time, b) most notebooks don't have a green line at all. On the screenshot, it can be seen that 'Volunteering Misc' green line is almost complete... but not quite.

 

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated - thanks, David

[gazumped 11,667]

Hi.  I love the bit that says "downloading may take some time..." - that seems to be the same time variable that applies in "coming soon"!

More seriously:  I'm not sure whether it's Evernote or the mobile network limiting speeds,  but clearly there's a need to leave sufficient bandwidth available for everyday browsing plus day-to-day 'phone services while still - eventually - downloading a large database of information.  Data transfer rates aren't great,  and most phones don't have a huge internal storage.  Some have additional external memory - which can also take time to write to...

All in all I think you might have to leave your phone connected overnight for a week or two to get 90 notebooks downloaded - and that's if you have the space available.

I gave up on trying to keep any large number of notes in local storage on my phone.  I just keep one notebook which is specifically the one mirrored on the phone,  and move any necessary files into that - and allow at least 24 hours to update the content before I try to use it.

[david_woznyorg 8]

Thanks gazumped.

I'm confident that I've left my mobile devices running EN in a connected state for well over a week.  I don't imagine I'm a heavy EN user; I've lots of notes, but not many with images or PDFs embedded, etc.

[agsteele 2,950]

My personal view is that offline notebooks don't work in Android. This is a function that still needs attention.

[BeEfficient 44]

i can tell you that the offline function is a disaster.

even if you would have all notes offline available, any update on an offline note does not get updated online quickly. So you get the same note 2x in the overview - the old original version + the updated one with the changes.

i wish the offline option would work perfectly but my experience so far is so bad.

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Can't confirm this observation, at least not on my iOS devices.

The initial download is a real PITA, took me 3 days. But since all notes update pretty fast, happening while normally using the app in the background. Sure, when you have been offline, you need to sync first. If you touch a note online that was as well modified offline and not yet synced, EN will not know which is the "real" change, and produce a conflict note to protect both changes from being overwritten.

To speed up the sync after coming back online, there is a manual sync option on all mobile clients, in the settings menu.

[gazumped 11,667]

I think the moral of the story is:  if you're having hassles with this (or any other) feature - feed it back to Evernote by any means possible (like commenting here) and if you can - raise a support ticket and let the team look at your logs so they have more information about what is going wrong,  and hence a better chance to fix it...

Subscribers raise support queries here - https://help.evernote.com/hc/requests/new and Free users here - https://twitter.com/evernotehelps (or use any feedback option). 

 

[david_woznyorg 8]

3 hours ago, gazumped said:

I think the moral of the story is:  if you're having hassles with this (or any other) feature - feed it back to Evernote by any means possible (like commenting here) and if you can - raise a support ticket and let the team look at your logs so they have more information about what is going wrong,  and hence a better chance to fix it...

Subscribers raise support queries here - https://help.evernote.com/hc/requests/new and Free users here - https://twitter.com/evernotehelps (or use any feedback option). 

 

I hadn't realised there was a means for a subscriber to raise a support call on Evernote. I shall do that now, and mark your response as a solution.

Cheers, Dave

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Better raise the ticket from the iOS device where you encounter the problem. The support option is in the app settings, tab support. By default an activity log will be attached, that allows support to check in more detail what may be going on.

Support tickets should always be raised from the device where a problem shows.

[Fred V. 55]

I have just raised a ticket about that because I have never seen a notebook fully online.

I have tried to go through all notes of a notebook quickly to force sync but it doesn't work : you need to open all notes to be sure they are kept offline...

I can't understand Evernote doesn't fix this issue .. It has been a long time since the release of the "new" version and the offline sync is still broken. 

Telling people to wait for a long time or some days is not enough. I have a notebook with 10 notes and the progress bar doesn't change at all !

[agsteele 2,950]

I think Evernote devs are aware of this issue. I received a new version of the Android app today which specifically attempts to address the issue. I can't say if it works but work is being done.

[Fred V. 55]

48 minutes ago, agsteele said:

I think Evernote devs are aware of this issue. I received a new version of the Android app today which specifically attempts to address the issue. I can't say if it works but work is being done.

The issue has been seen since the release of the Evernote "new generation", so it would be surprising the fix happens exactly this week but if it is right, I will be really happy and gain trust in Evernote

[agsteele 2,950]

No idea if it will finally fix everything but this is what the release notes say...

Quote

What's new
Fixed
- Additional improvements to offline notebook download time
- Performance and stability improvements
- Miscellaneous bug fixes

 

[Fred V. 55]

31 minutes ago, agsteele said:

No idea if it will finally fix everything but this is what the release notes say...

 

Great news, I hope it is the same for iOS

[eric99 980]

On 10/6/2022 at 6:07 PM, agsteele said:

No idea if it will finally fix everything but this is what the release notes say...

 

I don't think so, I started it yesterday morning for 3000 notes and is still busy, stuck at about 40% . Last time I tried, it took 4 days. I see exactly the same behaviour now...

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Do you try „All Notebooks“, or do you download a few notebooks at a time only ?

[eric99 980]

7 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

Do you try „All Notebooks“, or do you download a few notebooks at a time only ?

A single notebook of 3000 notes

Running the latest software  v10.41, download hasn't be improved for offline notebooks, still busy for two days now...

[PinkElephant 8,117]

Quite a notebook … why not, we taggers trend to have less but larger notebooks. My largest is somewhat above 2.000 notes.

Seems the same patience as before is required when doing the offline download.

[Fred V. 55]

Hello,

well I have followed different topics and managed to sync all my very big notebooks (50 notebooks with some having more than 2000 notes)

As @PinkElephantexplained in a different topic,

On iOS, I have disabled all offline notebooks, then added only two of them

I have seen that the progress bar was working.. very slowly but it worked.

I think the main part is to keep Evernote in foreground and disable automatic lock. I have kept it in the list of notebooks and I never locked my phone.

And it worked.

I have then added more notebooks and I have seen that even if it is really slow, it was syncing correctly. I finished with adding all the notebooks I needed (i don't need to sync all of them offline) and it slowly managed to get everything.

Now I have little arrows on all notebooks and I have tried looking at notes while in airplane mode and it works fine.

It's very long and I think you need to keep the application running and in foreground but it works !