Multiple issues: lost content, content moved, cursor at bottom ... -- RTE based?

[Dave-in-Decatur 4,004]

Over the last few days I've been experiencing problems with one particular longstanding, frequently edited, moderately lengthy and complex, and quite important note. Today I ran into multiple problems with it, including versions of issues reported in threads such as https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/topic/145893-content-of-notes-is-disappearing/ and https://discussion.evernote.com/forums/topic/145995-notes-pinned-on-home-now-start-at-bottom/.

1. When I first looked at the note today, it had almost all of its content deleted. I restored a previous version from Note History (which creates a note with "Restored - " added to the front of the title). I cleaned it up some, exported it to .enex, and then re-imported it under the "Restored - " title. This of course generated a new note with a new identifier/link, which I hoped might somehow keep the problems from reoccurring, since other issues had been going on with the existing note for a few days (see #4).
2. I deleted the earlier, now defective copy of the note, and tried to change the title of the restored version by removing "the Restored - ". But in the Windows desktop app the change did not appear in the snippet(!), nor did it sync to the Web. Ultimately I had to change the title in the Web client also.
3. In the course of checking the title in various Evernote clients, I discovered that, although RTE seemed functional for the note, neither the avatar icons at the top nor the cursor markers in the body appeared when editing it in both the Windows desktop app and the Web client, though sometimes adding the Android app to the mix seemed to restore them.
4. This note (in its now-deleted version) had also lost some content in previous days, though not as much. Weirder yet, at other times content that I had typed near the top or middle of the note would appear at the end, either not appearing at all in its right place, or duplicating the material in the right place, or appearing as an earlier version of the material. I could see all of this in versions of the note saved in Note History.
5. In the Android app, this note and some seemingly random others are now opening at the bottom of the note when I open them, whether from the recent notes on the Home page, from the Notes list, or from a notebook.

I know we're just other users here, but this all seems too complicated--and, I hope, too temporary--to take to support. I'd love to know if others have experienced similar, particularly content moving around in a note.

#4 in particular makes me think that all of this is likely related to the rollout of the new RTE/sync structure, which might then also be true of what others are experiencing, esp. regarding content loss, in the threads I linked above. I don't think I've permanently lost content, thanks to noticing the loss immediately and being able to restore it, or to Note History. It's starting to feel a little dicey, frankly, though so far it seems limited to a small number of notes, for no obvious reason. But for all I know this has happened to other notes that I just haven't happened to open and look at lately. And that's disturbing.

From my experiences (including also the "syncing temporarily paused" issue -- EDIT: and now see Federico's post) and from what others have reported, I am coming reluctantly to the conclusions that the new RTE/sync was rolled out either before the technology was really ready or before the back end was fully up to speed for it, or both; and that it was unquestionably a mistake to roll out the AI cleanup beta before everything had completely settled in around the new sync. IMHO, it would have been better to be sure one big upgrade was working before setting the next one out.

[Webbie64 4]

Sounds risky bad news. Time to back up all Evernote so we've got a reliable current store of all notes (assuming that's still possible).

[eric99 1,077]

5 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

I know we're just other users here, but this all seems too complicated--and, I hope, too temporary--to take to support. I'd love to know if others have experienced similar, particularly content moving around in a note.

Is data loss / corruption not serious enough to open a ticket?

[PinkElephant 8,755]

What I see are toothing problems with the new sync. Collaborative it is super fast, but sometimes it seems to be on a hiccup. Then things stop, and restart themselves where they have been after a little wait.

That for sure is not the way it should be, and less informed users can easily destroy data while trying to reactivate a non responding client.

So I would say: This needs improvement, ASAP.

If support tickets help to sort it out, I don’t know. If it is caused by server or connection load, it should be very visible to those supervising server operations.

[eric99 1,077]

4 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

If support tickets help to sort it out, I don’t know. If it is caused by server or connection load, it should be very visible to those supervising server operations.

Support should at least know this. A connection overload should never cause data corruption. RTE should work fine offline and should merge the changes later. In this case I don't think there was even collaborative editing involved?

[laurence.glazier 142]

I lost a URL I put at the end of a Note on my iPhone an hour ago. I had been working on the Note while out, and wrote down the URL for reference. After I got home, I noticed the URL was missing on my laptop and iPad screens. I'm sure I saw it on my iPhone, but before long it was gone from there too, and is not in the Note History versions. It was not important information.

As the sync process may look at the Updated field, I am wondering if it related to the anomaly I have been noticing in the Updated property of my Notes. A few times an hour a note, seemingly at random, is marked as updated. So I have removed my Notes widget from the home screen, as the Recent Notes shows notes that aren't recent. Also Updated is adjusted when a note is moved to another notebook. I know this issue has come up here before, and may not be related to the issue I had with a line of my note disappearing. I am wondering if other are seeing this too? Clicking on Notes in the sidebar, selecting the "Side list" view and ordering by Updated would show this. 

I was testing RTE earlier and that was still working very well with changes reflected almost instantly on other screens.

[eric99 1,077]

Yes, I had a similar issue on my windows client (10.57.6)  : I lost a text line I added a few hours ago to an existing note.  This line was still there in the current history version which should be the same as my clients version!  I tried to synchronize but it didn't appear in my clients...

Edit: after thinking it through, a little bit more context:

1. I created the note on my android phone, closed the note and put my phone to sleep.
2. I went home and tried to open that note in my windows client. The note was there but the pictures wouldn't load.
3. In order to get the images, I opened my note on my phone again. Immediately the pictures arrived in my open note on the windows client.
4. I added the single line of text in the windows client
5. I closed the note in android and windows
6. a few hours later I discovered that the text line was not there anymore as described above

Conclusion: this is a merge problem, a little bit unexpected considering that Yjs keeps update timestamps to identify the order of updates and to resolve conflicts. This mechanism seems to have failed in this case...

 

[Boot17 1,532]

3 hours ago, laurence.glazier said:

A few times an hour a note, seemingly at random, is marked as updated

I've had this happen to me too, but I think it's only happened on notes that have tasks. Do you have tasks on any/all of those notes by chance?

[Dave-in-Decatur 4,004]

What I'm seeing seems to be the overlap or convergence of several problems that are being reported separately in the forums, and have been reported separately by many people to support. So this morning in the Android app (v. 10.51, which seems to be the latest), I searched on a term that appears in the title of a number of notes, and got a list of two results whose titles consisted only of that term. Then:

1. I tapped on one of them, but the note didn't appear, only a spinning circle for a minute or more (as reported here). Likewise with the second one. Later, after working on a different note, I repeated the search, and the same two notes showed up as the results. This time when I tapped on the first one it displayed just fine, and so did the second.
2. I went back to the search results, tapped on the first note again and it appeared, but this time I was taken to the bottom of the note instead of the top (as reported here for multiple OSes). This continued to happen every time I viewed that note. It has also happened with other notes, and indeed it may be happening now with every note.
3. When I went back to the Home page, there in the list of recent notes were these same two notes at the top of the list, even though I had not edited them but only viewed them (as reported here [and the following posts, including one from @Federico Simionato indicating they're working on it] and here [Android]).

I don't even know how to report this to support: all together, even though it appears to be 3 separate problems? Individually, even though they have popped up for me simultaneously? But #1 is temporary and intermittent (though I also saw it on the Web client today), and #2 is only an inconvenience, not a loss of data or functionality. #3, which can certainly mess up access to what one is currently working on, is known to be under investigation. It's these weird confluences of issues that makes me think there is something screwy with the overall RTE/sync upgrade--maybe just growing pains, but maybe due in part to insufficient allocation of resources.

EDIT: FWIW, I did report #2 to support. It's just getting too annoying. In the Android forum, staff say they're working on it.

[AIGuy1618 5]

I have had this happen multiple times, always with notes with tasks - the more tasks in a note, the more severe the issue.

The worst was today, a note with over 100 tasks, all reverted to "Untitled task", support rightly suggested I restore a note from history.  To my shock, even the notes in my history had significant issues; missing tasks, tasks with only half information, e.g. text there but due dates missing.

I am 100% convinced this is to do with the RTE / sync rollout.

I just hope it gets resolved soon.

[laurence.glazier 142]

2 hours ago, Boot17 said:

I've had this happen to me too, but I think it's only happened on notes that have tasks. Do you have tasks on any/all of those notes by chance?

There were no tasks in this note, which was one I created today. However I had used AI Clean-up on it shortly before adding the line which subsequently disappeared.

[Dave-in-Decatur 4,004]

4 hours ago, Boot17 said:

I've had this happen to me too, but I think it's only happened on notes that have tasks. Do you have tasks on any/all of those notes by chance?

FWIW, none of the notes I saw this happen with have tasks.

[DC_KT 0]

I am seeing a few of these issues as well. (FYI, on Mac App and iOS App)  The ones that I am seeing regularly that have the most impact are:

1. Issues syncing across devices.  I primarily update my notes in my Mac App.  I will occasionally update on my iPhone or iPad.  Sometimes when I open up a note on my iPhone... it is not the latest version of the note.  Then when I add to the note, I am adding to the old version (unknowingly) and all previous updates are lost.  The only way to recover is to try to restore a previous version and then re-add the latest updates.  I don't always notice the issue right away so this is a huge pain.  The other problem is that you now lose all your version history because the restored note does not retain older versions.
2. Notes with tasks.  The tasks will randomly disappear from the notes and then you lose any record of the task being added, complete, etc.  Similar issues to my previous point on trying to restore an older version of the note.

I have raised this with support but they basically provide no value other than telling you to re-install the app or some other work-around that is not fixing the root of the problem / bug.  Now with them almost doubling the price of subscription... this is definitely going to start pushing subscribers away from the platform.  I am looking at Notion at the moment which might be a great no/lower cost alternative without the issues.  They also offer a means of moving from Evernote to Notion.  If this isn't fixed and I am not able to get support, might not have a choice.  I can't risk constantly losing content.