Experiencing a lot of duplications

[idoc 404]

My general work flow is to go to my inbox and adjudicate each note there by giving it tags and then moving it into the appropriate notebook. Recently I've noticed my inbox appearing fuller than expected.  I look through them and can almost swear that I have already dealt with these notes.  So why are they still in the Inbox?  For example, there is a tax notice sitting there that has no tags.  When I check the notebook that I normally use for Tax stuff I see that I have already taken care of this particular note 3 times already.  This means that the note keeps reappearing in my inbox and I keep re-tagging it and moving it to the Tax notebook where it is now sitting in multiple iterations.  I have noticed this trend with many notes.  Today I whittled my inbox down to 12 notes and then did a Quit Evernote.  When I re-opened it I noticed that there were now 40 notes sitting in the Inbox and most of these are ones that just took care of minutes ago.  Would love some help with dealing with this (never say anything like this with Legacy).

P.S: I am using EN for desktop v10 on win 10, EN for IOS and EN web.  The problem is the same with all of them.

[idoc 404]

In fact, here's a screen shot that shows that I took care of the same document multiple times and it kept re-appearing in my inbox.  This is really maddening and making EN v10 fairly unusable for me.

[PinkElephant 8,281]

Before digging into your setup and stuff:

Ask support. They can check on the activity log. We can’t !

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

[agsteele 2,976]

Apart from what @PinkElephantsaid, you could try rebuilding your local data. I don't think that will resolve the notes that have been duplicated but might well resolve for the future 

[gazumped 11,771]

Yeah - I do a lot of mail sorting and this has never happened to me.  

[idoc 404]

I'm wondering if this has something to do with the fact that I use EN on multiple platforms eg: iphone, ipad, EN web and ENv10 windows.  I've been thinking of using some of these as "read only" mode ie: not actually doing anything on them other than searching for stuff.  I will open a ticket with EN also.  Thanks!

[Dave Green 214]

I also find it valuable to close Evernote on a device if I am going to use another device and any of them are going to be off the network.   Then wait as they restart and stabilize before making any changes.

[idoc 404]

Thanks Dave.  I'm even wondering whether my ios EN widgets on my iphone are messing things up.  I use it frequently to add things to EN or to search but it now strikes me that it is "open" all the time.  I deleted it from my iphone and am now swiping off the EN on my iphone every time I finish doing something.  Same on the ipads.  Likewise, I tend to leave tabs of EN web open on my chrome browser eg: Inbox, Work etc.  This has been very useful as I can get directly to my various notebooks directly by choosing one of my bookmarked tabs on Chrome; nonetheless, I will stop doing this and shut the tabs down the moment I"m done with them.  Perhaps none of these steps will help but I will start monitoring the duplications and see if any of this works.

[PinkElephant 8,281]

Would be interesting to see if this helps in your case. I have the client open on several devices at the same time, in parallel, and no duplication at all.

The only thing I do (more out of a habit) is to leave the note I was working on when I leave the client; on iOS by hitting the green checkmark.

What I observe is that green triangle showing in notes list that indicates a note still needs to sync. It will be there for a little, and then is gone. Maybe this indicates a critical time if the note is opened simultaneously on another client while sync is open.

[idoc 404]

Thanks Pink.  Now that I've closed EN on every device (except my desktop) I do not see this duplicative behavior over the last few days.  I used to have EN open on phone, ipads, multiple computers etc.  I assume that the duplication is related to this and can test that hypothesis later by becoming more lax with the clients I use.  

[idoc 404]

OK.  So I've figured out where the duplications are coming from.  It's not any of the things discussed above.  I just did an update on EN (one of the usual ones that we seem to get every few days) and I suddenly noticed about 30 old notes suddenly pop up again in the inbox.  These are notes that were tagged and filed elsewhere just the other day ( and several times already) and they have popped up again for the 4th or 5th time.  I am now realizing that these notes are getting duplicated every time I do an update.

[s2sailor 2,341]

If you haven’t already it sounds like time to open a support request.  You are describing pretty unique behavior. The support team should be able to figure out what is happening from your activity logs.  They may need to do some repair to your database.

[PinkElephant 8,281]

Now when you mention it …

I had a similar event several release cycles ago, maybe 3 months. After the update on one of my Macs notes started to pop up, duplicated. I have then decided to shut down the client. 

When I opened it again, everything had corrected itself. Just the duplicates were still there. I filed a support ticket with activity log, that went nowhere. And the event didn’t repeat itself.

No idea what may have caused the problem, back then or now in your case.

[idoc 404]

Thanks for your help with that.  I submitted a ticket on this when I first posted but did not hear back.  I submitted another one today.

[agsteele 2,976]

Did you manage to record your data as suggested earlier?

[idoc 404]

11 hours ago, agsteele said:

Did you manage to record your data as suggested earlier?

In what sense? I did not rebuild my local data. I closed all instances of EN on all clients but that didn’t help. I then opened a ticket. I do not see any advice regarding “recording”. Not sure what this means. Do you mean backing up my enex data? Yes, I do that every few months. 

[agsteele 2,976]

Sorry, rebuild is what I intended but predictive text took me a different route ... 🤐

[idoc 404]

Here's some more follow up:  This problem actually occurs every time I quit EN (not just when I update).   I tried deleting them in various way ie: individually, in batches but the problem persists.  In short, when I delete notes from my inbox in EN desktop win, they pop back again whenever I try Quitting or Signing in.  The same 40 or so notes keep coming back over and over.  I've tried erasing the cache, shutting and re-starting the computer etc.    In my final experiment I went to EN web and to EN IOS and tried deleting the notes from there.  This worked but with a strange anomaly ie: every time I signed out and then back in to these versions I would see zombie notes coming into the Inbox, but after about 1 minute they would disappear and the Inbox would reflect the correct number of notes.  As long as I delete notes from Web or IOS the system works and even EN desktop syncs to the correct number of notes.  However, whenever I close and open EN desktop the zombies come rushing back in and a few minutes later rush into the web and ios version as well.  This issue has rendered EN unusable for me.  Tech support has not been helpful.  Would love any advice on this.  Also, not sure what "rebuild the database" means or if it would help.  Does this mean that when I sign out I should choose "Remove my Evernote data from this device" ?

 

P.S: In 12 years of Legacy I've never experienced issues like this.

 

[s2sailor 2,341]

38 minutes ago, idoc said:

Does this mean that when I sign out I should choose "Remove my Evernote data from this device" ?

 

Yes.  After you do this, go to the web and remove the offending notes.  Once all of these notes are gone then reinstall the desktop app.  It will then download a new local database from the server.

[idoc 404]

By “remove the offending notes” do you mean that I should permanently delete them in all of the various notebooks where they reside? The issue is that these same 40 notes keep appearing in the Inbox every time I open the app regardless of whether they’ve already been deleted. A copy of each of these can be found in various notebooks and they are all crucial notes. I can’t delete them but I could rename each of them or put them in another notebook. 

[s2sailor 2,341]

I haven’t read the entire note trail so maybe you’ve tried this already. It sounds like the database on your windows system may be corrupt, so what I’m suggesting is to delete the app and when it asks, chose to remove the data.  Then go to the web and delete the duplicates, or rename them.  Basically clean this up the way you want.  After the database looks good on the web now reinstall the Windows app.  It will download a new, and hopefully fixed database that matches what you see on the web.

[idoc 404]

Thanks so much for that recco.  I must have been unduly worried about doing these steps ie: choosing to delete my local data, deleting and reinstalling EN.  However, I did all that and it worked and now the app is no longer misbehaving.  The thing that confuses me is that even though I chose to delete all my data from this machine,  after downloading EN I was able to see all of my data immediately.  I always thought that if did this it would take many hours or days to reconstitute it all on the machine again.  Nope, it was all back again instantly.  I assume I have a profound misunderstanding of how this all works.

[s2sailor 2,341]

Glad to hear that you are up and running again.  They made some recent changes to improve the initial download speed.  Sounds like they worked. 

[agsteele 2,976]

The note thumbnails download almost immediately. If you select a note it will open directly from the server. What takes some time is downloading the offline copies. So don't rebuild your data if you intend to immediately work offline.

[idoc 404]

Does this mean that even though everything looked entirely normal I should keep my computer on because data is downloading in the background?  And if so, how do I know it's downloading and how would I know when it's done?  Why does the app not give any instructions regarding any of this?  It's all surprisingly opaque. 

[gazumped 11,771]

9 minutes ago, idoc said:

Does this mean that even though everything looked entirely normal I should keep my computer on because data is downloading in the background?  And if so, how do I know it's downloading and how would I know when it's done?  Why does the app not give any instructions regarding any of this?  It's all surprisingly opaque. 

Just use your computer as normal.  I think the app is insulating you from the mechanics of seeing your data.  It doesn't matter to the app whether note content comes from a local file or the server.  It will show you the content you ask for as quickly as possible.  The only possible problem is if you're offline and want something that hasn't downloaded yet,  you'll get an error.