Sync / Conflicted Notes Issue makes Evernote almost unusable on multiple devices!

[mvmcali 0]

I have EN on Mac as an app and also on my android S21.

i am very careful to only update a note on one platform and wait for it to sync to the 2nd platform before editing that note on the 2nd platform .

But the conflict still occurs!  

is this a known. bug in EN or am i doing something wrong

[Kaye Swain Realtor 0]

Happening to me too! 

 

[agsteele 2,948]

A good number of reports suggest duplicated notes are a problem for some.

Equally there are many others who say that they never have an issue. (I am one of those).

So there is an issue but there is no consensus on the cause. I can say that I almost always go back to Home on my desktop so no note had focus.

Evernote is currently beta testing a new sync process. The hope is that this will resolve this issue as well as offering new function.

[mvmcali 0]

hi Agsteele .   im not sure if I remember to go 'back to home' but I am sure, with my test cases, that i clearly see the note has been updated on the alternate device before I begin to edit it.     also, the problem seems to be intermittent.... it doesnt happen all the time.     thanks for the update, i hope the new sync process works better

[ummmerrrehhh 0]

I have been having this problem constantly for the past few weeks.  I generally edit mostly on the Mac desktop app and this is definitely not an issue of syncing across multiple devices.  (Don't even get me started on THAT)

[PinkElephant 8,109]

4 hours ago, ummmerrrehhh said:

I have been having this problem constantly for the past few weeks.  I generally edit mostly on the Mac desktop app and this is definitely not an issue of syncing across multiple devices.  (Don't even get me started on THAT)

Part of the title of this whole thread reads „… on multiple devices“.  You say right away you „have this problem“, only to then continue it has nothing to do with multiple devices.

So from your own posting I come to the conclusion:

You may have a problem, but not „this problem“. That statement is just misleading.

So don’t try to hijack a thread that does NOT describe your problem. You are free to open your own thread, or look for one about duplication on one single device.

[alexander.graah 0]

Same problem here.

If I edit a note on multiple devices, it's the rule rather than the exception that a sync issue occurs (duplicates created). But even on one device, it happens several times a week for me, and I'm not a particularly heavy user - the other day, I suddenly had 3 identical copies of a note. This tends to happen most frequently right after the Evernote desktop app freezes randomly for 15-20 seconds, which it does rather frequently. 

To me it does not appear to have anything to do with note size.

In a world where this stuff works smoothly in Google Docs, and mostly smoothly in Microsoft 365, I find it difficult to swallow the experience I've been having with Evernote since the "new" generation was released.

[KasimirBrown 1]

I have the same problem: I use two to three different devices and have conflicts everyday.

It makes Evernote hard to use for me. I have to manually delete the duplicates,

Especially annoying is that if that happens to a document that you have saved as favorite. Than you have to change the favorite status to the most up dated version.

I assume that is difficult to solve for Evernote because it lies deep in their sync-logic. Or is there another reason why this problem exists that long without being solved?

I must say: I expect the sync to work. Many other tools show how its done. Like Google Docs or even Confluence. In this tools I can open Docs in 10 devices without conflicts. It is not very state of the art to have problems like that. 

Edited January 26, 2023 by KasimirBrown

[PinkElephant 8,109]

Using EN on in total 9 devices: iOS, Macs, Windows, web. I don‘t have syncing problems, and I don‘t have note conflicts.

Hard to tell what may be wrong, but I would check the internet connection. Watch out for elevated values on Ping, Jitter and Package Loss.

[1alex 1]

I just want to add one more voice to the "syncing UX is not great for me" crowd.

I mostly want to edit the short note widget on multiple devices several times a day.

Right now I can see that

 - on my laptop there are old entries in it and 

 - they did not get updated in the last 10 minutes

 - I selected and deselected the note a few times, both on my phone, which has the newer version and on my laptop

 - I would be happy, if I could just trigger syncing manually (EDIT: Oh, there is a possibility to trigger syncing on both sides, found it now; sorry)

As is this kind of blocks me from adding anything, unless I want to merge manually later.

A manual sync button seems the easiest option, but if this gets improved some other way I'd be happy as well, of course. (EDIT: sorry, there is such a button (on mobile) or hotkey (on laptop), sorry)

(EDIT2: I found the sync button, but the scratch pad isn't syncing ... sigh ... ok, I can see it's not a clear-cut problem description .. so nevermind I suppose, insofar this thread is concerned.)

Replying to @PinkElephant: My connections seems fine as far as I can tell. Happy to do more measurements.

ping evernote.com   
PING evernote.com (35.190.29.187): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 35.190.29.187: icmp_seq=0 ttl=120 time=18.009 ms
64 bytes from 35.190.29.187: icmp_seq=1 ttl=120 time=16.731 ms
64 bytes from 35.190.29.187: icmp_seq=2 ttl=120 time=14.946 ms
64 bytes from 35.190.29.187: icmp_seq=3 ttl=120 time=14.310 ms
64 bytes from 35.190.29.187: icmp_seq=4 ttl=120 time=15.308 ms
64 bytes from 35.190.29.187: icmp_seq=5 ttl=120 time=16.735 ms
64 bytes from 35.190.29.187: icmp_seq=6 ttl=120 time=13.390 ms
64 bytes from 35.190.29.187: icmp_seq=7 ttl=120 time=16.017 ms
64 bytes from 35.190.29.187: icmp_seq=8 ttl=120 time=13.723 ms
^C
--- evernote.com ping statistics ---
9 packets transmitted, 9 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 13.390/15.463/18.009/1.451 ms

 

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,959]

@1alex, if you force a sync, the scratch pad should update to the latest version from another device. But TBH I'm not sure that's how it was designed to be used. It might be safer to create a utility note and pin it to the home screen, and do the necessary editing on that.

[PinkElephant 8,109]

The short note widget / scratchpad is AFAIK not synced. It is meant as a convenient way to save some ideas quickly on a device.

To sync content from the scratchpad, it needs to be converted into a note first.

[bmcl26 488]

32 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

The short note widget / scratchpad is AFAIK not synced. It is meant as a convenient way to save some ideas quickly on a device.

To sync content from the scratchpad, it needs to be converted into a note first.

If I type anything in the Scratch Pad Widget it syncs with my other devices. 

[1alex 1]

Yeah, it is being synced for me. Just not very quickly, at least in my case, yesterday (long-term studies pending 🙂 ).

I ended up with having to choose between three versions from two devices 🙃.

Nevertheless, using a pinned note instead sounds like a good hint, thanks!

[esetter230 16]

This problem has been going on for years. For me, none of the suggested solutions have worked. Despite being a user for 14 years, I’ve given up on a solution. 

[PinkElephant 8,109]

Which "problem" ?

Sync will always go through the server, there is no device-to-device sync. If you know this, it is pretty obvious how sync it proceeding, and when a change has proliferated to all other clients. I need to really time my interventions if I want to provoke a note conflict. During normal use it rarely happens (in my case less than a handful of conflict notes per year).

[esetter230 16]

3 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Which "problem" ?

Sync will always go through the server, there is no device-to-device sync. If you know this, it is pretty obvious how sync it proceeding, and when a change has proliferated to all other clients. I need to really time my interventions if I want to provoke a note conflict. During normal use it rarely happens (in my case less than a handful of conflict notes per year).

Note conflict problem.  We've shared comments about this in past years on different threads.  I always make sure that Evernote is only running on one device at a time, force a sync after all changes, etc.  Still days later, if I open the Windows desktop app, a note conflict appears with one of the conflicted notes being days old.  I've given up sending Evernote support log files. Years ago they recognized the program bug, but it has never been fixed.  I realize that not everyone has experienced the note conflict. My guess is the Windows app does not sync from the Evernote server when it first opens. On occasions, my iPhone app has identified a note conflict, but this rarely happens.

[agsteele 2,948]

I'm a Windows/Android user. I think I've had just one note conflict in the past year and I knew it would happen almost as soon as I had edited a note. I edited the note online. Then an hour or so later edited the same note on a device that had been offline. As soon as I finished typing I realised what I had done. As sure as eggs are eggs up popped a conflicted note.

Otherwise the sync process works will for me in my use.

I'm not suggesting that others don't have this issue. But it certainly isn't clear why it affects some and not others. My view is that it is the way we each work.

My hope is that the revised sync process which remains in beta will resolve things. My impression, though, is that this revision is proving rather challenging.

[eric99 980]

9 minutes ago, agsteele said:

My hope is that the revised sync process which remains in beta will resolve things. My impression, though, is that this revision is proving rather challenging.

What exactly do you mean by "remains in beta"? Was it intended to be released now? I'm sure that concurrent editing is much more challenging than the simple sync we have now, and that is already a disaster.

[agsteele 2,948]

I mean that the updated sync process has not been released for general use. It remains as a beta test. Presumably that's what will remain until the new sync is working correctly. 

[eric99 980]

1 minute ago, agsteele said:

I mean that the updated sync process has not been released for general use. It remains as a beta test. Presumably that's what will remain until the new sync is working correctly. 

Hopefully Bending Spoon developers are more experienced in concurrent programming techniques

[Paul A. 621]

5 minutes ago, eric99 said:

What exactly do you mean by "remains in beta"? Was it intended to be released now? I'm sure that concurrent editing is much more challenging than the simple sync we have now, and that is already a disaster.

At the beginning of last year Ian Small indicated that the new sync architecture should arrive in 2022, so yes, it's late. He's actually been hinting at it for at least a couple of years now, so clearly it's been technically very challenging.

Hopefully the engineers working on it were not adversely affected by the recent layoffs (though I imagine even if not directly affected, having many friends and colleagues laid off can't be good for productivity in the near-term.)

[PinkElephant 8,109]

I don’t participate in the beta, so just thinking. No company could make the step from file based to content based sync without changing the whole data model. If a „granular“ sync is the goal, any „file“ (note) needs to be decomposed in tiny elements, and every change of one of the elements must be reflected in the different copies.

This is challenging in itself in say a spreadsheet (where the cell is a logical choice of an „element“) or a page processor. But I don’t have a perspective of how to do this on embedded objects like a PDF or a picture. We will see how long it takes to get this modification out of beta and into the day to day use.

[Tazzz 21]

I have constant issues with sync-ing my phone (Samsung Note 20 Ultra) & PC (Windows 11). I need to close/restart the app multiple times, NEVER try to change the file on the other device unless I see a clear confirmation it is sync-ed, and still get duplicates constantly. Sync works properly maybe 1 out of 3 times. I lost documents because of this (created a new file on my phone, scanned some papers, when I opened on my computer the images didn't load, then they dissapeared on my phone because the latest version of the file was on the PC). Stupid to say the least.

[bmcl26 488]

On 2/22/2023 at 2:38 AM, esetter230 said:

I always make sure that Evernote is only running on one device at a time, force a sync after all changes, etc.

When working on EN (Usually on Windows Desktop), I also have EN open on my Android phone, but I do not try to edit notes simultaneously.  When I have finished editing, I check on the phone that all notes have been updated (usually, sync takes less than 30 secs).

[Abdulgader Deebes 1]

Problem of synchronization make things harder. Most of the time I'm deleting the duplecated notes or re-entering missing information doesn't get updated.....

This problem makes Evernote hard to use and can not depend on it..... 

[dejayajay 0]

Can I recover data (Note entries) that seem to have been lost due to a Note Conflict? I've been searching for this but not getting ahead.

[dejayajay 0]

I’m trying to upgrade to Personal to access Notes History, but on my Apple devices Evernote tells me to upgrade via my Android device, and on my Samsung, in Evernote, the upgrade links are unresponsive. Argh!

[PinkElephant 8,109]

it depends on where you hold your subscription: On iTunes, on G-Play or with EN directly.

That you can't pay for a G-Play account while on an iPhone (and vice versa) seems logical to me.

[Tom Lent 8]

This has been a problem for me for years also. Between Windows and a Galaxy 22 Android. 

I've taken to editing the title on a note when I edit it to have a quick indication on the opposite device  if/when the sync has happened.

I've now lost sync entirely between the Windows app and both the  browser and the Android app, but that is a topic for a different thread.

[agsteele 2,948]

6 hours ago, Tom Lent said:

lost sync entirely between the Windows app and both the  browser and the Android app, but that is a topic for a different thread.

It is. Just to note that the issue is always a broken sync with the cloud since that is the stepping stone. I'd try rebuilding your Windows data but first capture any notes you've created on Windows which haven't synced.