Recent data loss in Evernote -- PSA to check your important notes

[thefryhole 50]

A decade ago I clipped an article in HTML format to Evernote. The anniversary of the event covered in the article is coming up and I wanted to revisit it. I was sad to discover the photos in my note are now gone, replaced by broken image links. Thank goodness the publication still had the article available online, which was a surprise as it's a rather small outlet and they don't keep many old stories on the website. The event was a very big deal locally and I'm glad I was able to resave the story (with working pictures) and store it in a more durable location so it will be available to me another 10 years down the road.

Posting this so anyone else storing data in EN can be aware that it might be worth checking now if your important notes are still intact, before it's too late to restore content that might have been lost along the way.

With a second brain like Evernote, who needs dementia? 😂

[VincentC 271]

Did you happen to check to see if the note is available on the web app?  If you haven't checked, the note may still be there and there is an issue with your local database rather than actual data loss.  

 

Vinnie

[thefryhole 50]

Yes, verified the images are also gone in the web version.

Some other notes of similar vintage appear to be fine so it isn't 100% data loss across the board, but I will check each before exporting to be sure all the content is there.

[mackid1993 746]

So it's possible the images weren't saved locally but rather embedded in the HTML as

<img src="http://wherever.com/img.jpg"> 

and wherever the image was hosted has changed in the last 10 years resulting in a broken link since the clip is well 10 years old. This also happens with very old HTML based emails where the images are hosted externally. 

This isn't data loss on Evernote's part, sorry.

[VincentC 271]

"Yes, verified the images are also gone in the web version."

 

And I"m sorry that they're gone but happy for you that you were able to find them elsewhere.

 

Vinnie

[thefryhole 50]

8 minutes ago, mackid1993 said:

So it's possible the images weren't saved locally but rather embedded in the HTML as

<img src="http://wherever.com/img.jpg"> 

and wherever the image was hosted has changed in the last 10 years resulting in a broken link since the clip is well 10 years old. This also happens with very old HTML based emails where the images are hosted externally. 

This isn't data loss on Evernote's part, sorry.

Good to know. I don't check how images are placed within a website when clipping it and I didn't realize clipping in HTML was so brittle. My impression was that the images would be fixed within the note but it sounds like I was mistaken. I'll have a much longer list of notes to review because it seems likely there are more "preserved" images that are now long gone.

[mackid1993 746]

3 minutes ago, thefryhole said:

Good to know. I don't check how images are placed within a website when clipping it and I didn't realize clipping in HTML was so brittle. My impression was that the images would be fixed within the note but it sounds like I was mistaken. I'll have a much longer list of notes to review because it seems likely there are more "preserved" images that are now long gone.

If you inspect the HTML and see something like that code snippet I shared that means Evernote is literally clipping the HTML as it is on the website. I don't know this for sure but since you said it was an HTML clip I would suspect that would be the culprit.

In the future to preserve the images use the clipper to take a screenshot as well. Plus with a screenshot Evernote can still search within the image using OCR.

[gazumped 11,695]

Personally I was shocked and horrified to find that things I saved 20+ years ago are still available... 

2013_01_21_18_16_06 cutting.pdf

[Cristiano478 155]

15 horas atrás, thefryhole disse:

A decade ago I clipped an article in HTML format to Evernote. The anniversary of the event covered in the article is coming up and I wanted to revisit it. I was sad to discover the photos in my note are now gone, replaced by broken image links. Thank goodness the publication still had the article available online, which was a surprise as it's a rather small outlet and they don't keep many old stories on the website. The event was a very big deal locally and I'm glad I was able to resave the story (with working pictures) and store it in a more durable location so it will be available to me another 10 years down the road.

Posting this so anyone else storing data in EN can be aware that it might be worth checking now if your important notes are still intact, before it's too late to restore content that might have been lost along the way.

With a second brain like Evernote, who needs dementia? 😂

It's worth taking a look at the "note history" (my language is not English, so I don't know if the name is really that in English). It's in the three-dot menu at the top right of the note.

Once I saw that attachments were missing from a note and I managed to recover them using this option