Evernote changed the "updated" date on hundreds of my old notes

[Thorz 124]

At some point this year, Evernote changed the “updated” date for lots of my old notes. There is really nothing to do with this now, the damage is already done, the update dates have already been changed, they are now lost, and I don't see any way to get back to the real ones. The notes' content and creation dates are thankfully intact.

This is very noticeable, especially when viewing old notebooks I haven't touched in years. Many of the notes inside them now have updated dates of this year, something that is incorrect.

Looking at many of these new dates, I guess whatever happened took place around March-April 2024. I don't know if it was something at their end on the database kept at the servers, or if it was something on one of the clients that changed the dates. I use Evernote on Windows, Mac, web, and iOS and my clients have been reinstalled several times this year trying to solve different issues. Reinstalling has involved the fresh downloading of all note content from the server at some point. Reinstalling Evernote shouldn't affect the notes' metadata though, I have done this many times before without consequences.

I have checked the “note history” on some affected notes to see if the date changes were registered there, but as there was no content change, just the date metadata change, nothing was registered.

Not all the notes were altered, there are still thousands that preserve the correct update dates.

This is extremely annoying.

[gazumped 12,072]

40 minutes ago, Thorz said:

This is extremely annoying.

I can imagine - sympathies for the confusion caused,  but even if you're resigned to writing the lost data off,  I'd suggest you raise it with Support.  It may be something they're unaware of,  and if they can put some kind of checks in place,  maybe this can be avoided in future...

[Mike P 2,981]

10 hours ago, Thorz said:

At some point this year, Evernote changed the “updated” date for lots of my old notes.

You are probably aware, but just in case you are not, the updated date is changed when a number of changes we may count as insignificant are made. For example adding a tag, moving the note to a different notebook etc. There have also been bugs in the past where even viewing a note caused the updated date to be changed.

[PinkElephant 8,819]

In general the new system treats every change to a note as update. This includes metadata like tags, the notebook relation. 

Reinstalling the client does not change the date. There were at least 2 periods in time when only opening a note for viewing changed the updated date. This was a bug, which was removed, and then it came back and needed to be removed again.

[Thorz 124]

6 hours ago, Mike P said:

You are probably aware, but just in case you are not, the updated date is changed when a number of changes we may count as insignificant are made. For example adding a tag, moving the note to a different notebook etc. There have also been bugs in the past where even viewing a note caused the updated date to be changed.

Thank you. Yes I am aware that doing those things changes the updated date, but I haven't done anything like that with my notes.

I have seen the bug you describe, that at times just viewing a note changes the update date. This doesn't happens all the time but I have definitely seen it happening. It's frustrating, but it had never happened before with a huge number of my notes.

I see hundreds that have got the update date changed to April 22, 2024

[Thorz 124]

I created a ticket and received an answer from the support AI:

It appears that the changes in the 'updated' date metadata for your notes may be related to the significant update to Evernote's syncing infrastructure called RENT (Remaining ENTities), which was released in August 2024.
(...)
The RENT update ensures real-time synchronization across different accounts and devices, which might have led to the observed changes in the 'updated' dates of your notes around March-April 2024. Unfortunately, if the original update dates have already been altered, there is no way to revert them back to the original dates.

So there you have it, it appears they have seen this issue before and it's something at their end. It sucks.

[gazumped 12,072]

Hmmn.  I just moved a bunch of notes into a new notebook without opening or otherwise editing any of them.  All of their updated dates are now set to 'today'.

[PinkElephant 8,819]

Moving into another notebook = metadata change = new updated date

[s2sailor 2,456]

As has been discussed previously, we could really use a separate note updated variable that we can sort on (based on note content change only) that is independent from the one that the system uses to maintain sync status.  Their current design basically makes sorting on date updated useless.

[Thorz 124]

3 hours ago, gazumped said:

Hmmn.  I just moved a bunch of notes into a new notebook without opening or otherwise editing any of them.  All of their updated dates are now set to 'today'.

Yes this is correct, though it wasn't my case.

[AlbertR 707]

3 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

metadata change = new updated date

It's really a mess. 😞 They insist to ignore that (metadata != note content) and ("update date" != "content update date"). 😡

They should ... 

2 hours ago, s2sailor said:

... use a separate note updated variable that we can sort on (based on note content change only) that is independent from the one that the system uses to maintain sync status.

[Sönke Luck 14]

I can confirm, that most of my years old notes have been touched around 23-27 March timeframe this year. Very bad bug, I think. Will see, what support will answer on this.

[APenNameAndThatA 6]

LOL. This should be the least of your problems with Evernote. 

 

[Feitz 264]

11 hours ago, APenNameAndThatA said:

This should be the least of your problems with Evernote.

I tend to disagree, V10 completely ruined the timeline of my notes and I find this a real problem.

I had certain notebooks where it came very handy that the notes were in chronological order, and now they are scattered randomly on my timeline. Outside of V10 I file every file with a 'YYYY-MM-DD - ' prefix to achieve that, but I didn't in Evernote (which with hindsight was a mistake) since it was by itself keeping things in chronological order.

[AlbertR 707]

On 9/23/2024 at 7:18 PM, Feitz said:

Outside of V10 I file every file with a 'YYYY-MM-DD - ' prefix to achieve that, but I didn't in Evernote (which with hindsight was a mistake)

??? Are you really taking about file (and note) updates?

EN handles the CreatedDate correct. I used to change the CreatedDate of notes to the date, the note content describes (i.e. if a PDF scan contains information from 13-jan-2023, the note gets this as its creation date - even if the scan dates from today. By doing so, my note has the correct CreatedDate with up UpdatedDate of today.

My (our) problem is the automatic update of the UpdateDate with every Tag- or Title-change. Please see and vote for more:

 

[Feitz 264]

7 hours ago, AlbertR said:

??? Are you really taking about file (and note) updates?

Yes, the external naming convention I use was just an example how I keep track of PDFs (that are not altered once created). Sorry for the confusion.

 

[s2sailor 2,456]

Today, I had two more notes changed to updated today when only viewed.  I hadn't seen this behavior in a while. Both of these were old notes with attached PDFs.  These had likely not been updated to the new sync note format so I thought maybe it was this update, or that I viewed the PDF that caused it.  Later, I tried to recreate this behavior with other old notes with attached PDFs and the updated dates remained unchanged (as they should), so I was unable to recreate the earlier observation.  Unfortunately, this issue still exists, is random, and I have no idea what triggers it.

[AlbertR 707]

6 hours ago, s2sailor said:

I tried to recreate this behavior with other old notes with attached PDFs

Did similar tests and cannot show the effect 😞 🙂 
Even with very old notes that seem to have NO UpdatedDate information (maybe Legacy didn't set and update this internal property whilst creating notes and changing only the CreationDate:

• This note was created and imported from import folder as a PDF file on 12.04.2020 (as you can see from the scanner-created date in file name and note title)
• It's CreationDate has been changed short time after (in Legacy) to 06.05.1996 because the PDF content describes a bill dated from 1996. 
• EN10 does not show the non-existing UpdatedDate property.
  • To be pseudo-intelligent, it uses the CreatedDate to fill the column in the note list
• But: The search phase "updated:day-1" shows this note 😤

I've described this here in the forums

and created a support ticket in parallel

Along with sending more details (including logs), I got a statement "Based on your description, it seems this is really close to what our team is observing." My final questions

(1) will there be change in EN10's behaviour around Created=>Updated for newly created notes?
(2) When will the bug around listing false notes be fixed?

where never answered and the bug has not been fixed (since over a year) in spite of the "team is observing" 🤔 

[bmcl26 578]

This is strange; not happening with my notes. I did a test by viewing some really old notes dating back to 2011, viewed around 10, and no changed date updated by merely viewing them.  (Windows App Win 11).

[s2sailor 2,456]

3 hours ago, bmcl26 said:

This is strange

Agreed.  I also could not later reproduce it and I’m glad others can’t either.  As further information, both notes were only attached PDFs with no other content.  I’ll look at this a little more today.

[Thorz 124]

It looks like the behavior is very inconsistent. At times when you open a random note just for viewing it the updated date is changed. But many other times when you do this the date isn’t changed.

Anyway, what made me start this post was not exactly this random bug that affect a small number of notes, it was that EN decided to arbitrarily change the updated date on hundreds of my notes without my intervention. It most probably happened after the reinstall of a Windows EN client around April 2024 and changing this back appears to be impossible now after what their support AI answered to me.

[s2sailor 2,456]

I can confirm that I also have very many (hundreds?) of notes where the date was updated in mid April this year.  
 

Also, I was able to replicate the date updated when only viewed problem, with another note today.  It was a PDF only note and I first had to tap it to download it, which was surprising since my offline status shows all notes downloaded.  Now that I’ve noticed this, the two notes that I reported yesterday also were not downloaded and had to be downloaded first before viewing.  So, the offline status appears to be imperfect too.