(Archived) Suggestion: Mandatory sync

[McNeves 0]

Hello, folks.

I just had a problem with Evernote and, after struggling to find an elegant solution, I ended up working around it, but it got me thinking of a nice improvement for future releases.

Before going on and telling you guys what happened, I must say that I lost at least a good hour looking for a solution in the forums, but didn't find anything of the sort.

I was checking a note on the windows based Evernote when I accidentally modified a note. Trying "CTRL + Z" didn't work. It was a single note and nothing major, but I didn't want to re-create most of its contents, so my first though was: "OK, I didn't sync, so my original note is intact on the servers and on my other devices."

Ok, problem is, whenever I synched, this broken version would be the latest one, so it'd overwrite everything else.

Here comes my suggestion - feature that doesn't seem to exist - why can't we choose what will be overwritten?

I mean, I knew my healthy copies were in the server and in my other devices, so why isn't there an option in Evernote that says "Let's synchronize, but let's PULL the changes rather than PUSH it"?

This way, whenever I know a device has a wrong version of my notes, I can set it to sync and discard the changes it has in itself, simply copying from the server the old versions.

As this is not available, I had to go all the way to make a change in that same note on another device and sync both, intentionally causing a "conflict change" and erasing the wrong one.

But that would be much more difficult if I had many wrong notes, or if I simply didn't know which notes were wrong.

What do you more techie guys think?

It would be a nice feature to have, wouldn't it?

Cheers, boys.

McNeves

P.S.: If this already exists, please excuse my ignorance and let me know how to activate the process.

[jbenson2 2,147]

I was checking a note on the windows based Evernote when I accidentally modified a note. Trying "CTRL + Z" didn't work.

I just tried it in Evernote Windows (version 4.5.2).

Ctrl + Z worked OK for me.

I tried making 3 different changes in a row.

Pressing Ctrl + Z three times brought back all the changes and deletions.

A reverse sync? Could cause more problems than it is worth if you forget which way it is set.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

What do you more techie guys think?

It would be a nice feature to have, wouldn't it?

No way. I create many notes each day on multiple computers & devices. I don't want to have to specify which note is to be considered the "master", each time I sync.

Ok, problem is, whenever I synched, this broken version would be the latest one, so it'd overwrite everything else.

Yes. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do - sync the changes you made to the note.

I mean, I knew my healthy copies were in the server and in my other devices,

If you are a premium member, you may be able to recover the note from the note history. Note history is only taken once every ~8 hours.

If you had this note on another computer, you could have gone to the 2nd computer & move the note into a local/non-sync'd folder. Sync the first computer (with the botched up note). Then sync the 2nd computer. Then on the 2nd computer, move the good note from a local notebook to a syn'cd notebook & sync. You now have both notes - the good one & the botched one.

If you had a good copy of the note on a device (IE iPad), you could have emailed it directly back to your Evernote account, using your Evernote assigned email address.

If you didn't have this note on any other computers (IE only on a phone or iPad), then, if you had a backup of your desktop database, you could restore the note from that. The process is a bit more complex & has been detailed elsewhere on the board.

So as you can see, a lot of ways to recover.

[Owyn 457]

Simplest workaround in this (infrequent) case is to:

- Open the note in the web client

- Copy the note contents from the web

- Paste the note contents into the note in the desktop client