(Archived) Save and Exit failed

[Nekroteros 1]

This morning I was taking thorough academic notes for about an hour and a half on my Nexus 7. About 5 minutes in Evernote did an autosave. When I finished taking my notes, I clicked the check in the top left, save and exit. Much to my chagrin, upon clicking it, the notes closed and some error popped up. Since it only lasted a second I didn't have time to take note of what it said. The notes had closed, but apparently the sync part failed, and I lost pages of notes, reverting back to the 5 minute mark. Not cool.

 

 

I don't expect I can recover said lost notes, but I would at least like the programmers to learn something from this. If you click the save and exit button and there is an error that keeps from syncing, for the love of god don't close the notes. Make it assure the sync is successful before closing. If the sync fails at least I can copy and paste the notes into another program that allows me to store locally.

 

Or, hey, allow me to store those notes locally at least until they can sync successfully.

[gazumped 11,658]

Hi - sorry to hear about this problem;  you may want to think about editing/ taking notes initially in another application which saves in real time and/ or to local storage,  then transferring to Evernote as a backup.  There's only so much Evernote can do without a viable network connection,  and they may not have access to sufficient local storage to retain the note.  If they did,  chances are the note would have been available to you on the Nexus when you next opened the app;  if any part of the note survived syncing,  you could check on the web client to see what was transferred.  If the web client reports only the 5 minute version,  try checking the  Nexus app again - you may have a 'conflicting changes' notebook with a different version of the same note,  or it may be in a trash folder if you have one..

 

Evernote doesn't store notes locally in the mobile apps other than in temporary storage pending sync.

[Faverey 0]

I just had a similar experience, hit save, quick error message, note gone. Literary gigabytes of storage space, ultra fast 4g connection, can't see what would be wrong on my end.

I looked through the forum and found numerous users complaining about (sometimes very serious) loss of data. I am now afraid to use evernote, since it would contain a LOT of personal information. TS posted his very simple and intelligent solution in March, it is now November. If this isn't a top priority issue, please tell me what is.

[gazumped 11,658]

I just had a similar experience, hit save, quick error message, note gone. Literary gigabytes of storage space, ultra fast 4g connection, can't see what would be wrong on my end.

I looked through the forum and found numerous users complaining about (sometimes very serious) loss of data. I am now afraid to use evernote, since it would contain a LOT of personal information. TS posted his very simple and intelligent solution in March, it is now November. If this isn't a top priority issue, please tell me what is.

 

Doesn't look like you're having much luck with the forum software either - your post came up twice,  but I deleted one entry.  You'll have to be a little more specific about your concerns - there have been complaints that data was 'lost',  but that's frequently due to a variety of problems that affect mobile devices including available storage space,  lack of a hard drive and erratic connections.  

 

If you could explain exactly what happened in respect of your data loss we might be able to help - you could also raise a support ticket (see below) to see if Evernote can assist - and to alert them to the situation.  

 

Provided you have a version of Evernote desktop running somewhere and keep your own backups of the database,  you'll have perfectly adequate cover against data loss.  Notes don't reside on the Android device unless you make them 'offline searchable' but if you amend the content it is possible to overwrite what's there.  

 

Which is where the Premium member's handy little utility to reset the note to a previous version comes in.

[Faverey 0]

Thanks for deleting the double entry.

"You'll have to be a little more specific about your concerns - there have been complaints that data was 'lost',  but that's frequently due to a variety of problems that affect mobile devices including available storage space,  lack of a hard drive and erratic connections."

 

I was trying to say that available storage space and erratic connection were no issue at the time I tried to save my note. I was on a smartphone with over 20Gb of free space, on a rock solid 4g connection in the center of Amsterdam. i'm not sure what you mean with lack of a hard drive, Surely Evernote is aware of general phone architecture? The phone does have a 64Gb sd card though. And yes, plenty of space there as well.

 

What happened is that I was writing a note, hit save, got an error message for a second, and then the note was gone.

I will look for it each time I hit save, so that I may catch it when it happens again.

 

"Provided you have a version of Evernote desktop running somewhere and keep your own backups of the database,  you'll have perfectly adequate cover against data loss."

I have that, but the problem here is that my work never reaches the online database to be saved at all.

 

Notes don't reside on the Android device unless you make them 'offline searchable' but if you amend the content it is possible to overwrite what's there." 

Thanks for that tip, I enabled offline notebooks. That may help, if it is implemented in such a way that the notebook is saved offline before it gets sent to the online database.

Would anyone happen to know? (of course we're talking about the specific situation that the device is online, not where there is no connection to begin with.)

 

"Which is where the Premium member's handy little utility to reset the note to a previous version comes in."

That is handy indeed, but it is damage control, rather than damage prevention. My work would still be lost. I think TS's point still stands: Evernote should NOT discard a note on a mobile device until it has confirmed the note is properly stored online. The least it should do is offer the possibility to try again. Saving locally would be the corerect way to go.

 

I will open a support ticket, and find out if Evernote can help, also with regard to the way offline saving is implemented. Thanks for taking the time to answer to my post.

[Faverey 0]

Apparently it is supposed to stay in the app. From Evernote support:

 

Karl: I'm not sure why this is happening. It really should not be. I recommend reinstalling and a reboot before installing again. Have you tried that yet?Eddy Faverey: Havent tried that yet, maybe it helps. Can you tell me what should happen when the online saving fails?Karl: The note should just remain unsynced in your app.

 

To be continued... or not if the error stays away.

[gazumped 11,658]

...That was spooky;  I just wrote a long post about disappearing data,  and - Chrome closed down completely and trashed it all..  There may be ghosts around here....  anyway.

 

Thanks for the additional details.  Your SD card,  though impressive,  won't help Evernote much.  Thanks to the folks at the Google factory,  Android won't allow anything other than media files to be stored there so Evernote competes with all the other apps for the device's internal space.  In the latest versions of Android 'move to SD card' isn't an option any more.  Don't know when or if that will change.

 

I have had some data loss in the sort of situation you're describing though - until you hit the little 'tick' in the top left corner of the screen to save and close the note,  the note contents are completely volatile - they've not been saved to the servers yet,  they only exist in the device's active memory.  And that's where I occasionally manage to hit a button to close the app which promptly folds its tent and disappears.

 

I keep the notes taken on my mobile device short for that reason - they're easier to replace if things go wrong.

 

If you're making longer notes it may be worth getting a Bluetooth keyboard to take random keypresses out of the equation!

[Faverey 0]

Are you talking about the bug that affected Samsung and HTC 'google play' editions at the introduction of Android 4.3? I think that was acknowledged to be a bug, and not the intentional setup from Google. I checked on my phone that runs Android 4.3,  and I am certainly able to move entire apps to the sd card. Evernote has this option greyed out. I think that has to do with using sync/push services, that require an app to be in active memory or they can of course not work. I also found that Evernote does indeed use some space on my sd card.That is, the memory manager reports it, but Samsungs file explorer does not show any files, even with 'show hidden files' checked.

 

And even if the sd card does not work, phones have internal memory that is permanent. Apart from the RAM that is indeed volatile, there is flash memory, capable of holding information even if you take the battery out of the phone. I would think that storing a note in flash memory before sending it out to synchronize would be a very robust way of working. In the end, not using this might be more of a commercial decision, wich causes a vulnerability. However, given the surprised response I got from EN support, I'm sure the design is not as bad as I feared.

 

The bluetooth keyboard might actually be a very good idea, not so much for the random keypress errors (again, I think that a good app designer should protect the users from most of those) but to be able to enter text quicker than I would with the onscreen keyboard or a touch pen.

[gazumped 11,658]

I know there's an Android update that fixes this - I'm still on 4.1 (Note to self - remind Samsung!) so you might have the improved version.  I should have suggested before - if you can post your support ticket number here we can get someone to take a look and see whether there's anything more to be done..

[Greg Watson 0]

It is now January 2014 and I am experiencing the exact same problem as at the start of this thread in March 2013: when I click the check-mark too save a note I sometimes lose all updates since the previous auto-save. I am using a Nexus 7 running android 4.4. The message that comes up says "saving note x to notebook y". There is no error message.

What has not been mentioned previously in this thread: I have used the free version of Evernote since 2010 without a problem. This week I upgraded to the premium version. Since upgrading, Evernote has lost all my updates on three different occasions.

[gazumped 11,658]

It is now January 2014 and I am experiencing the exact same problem as at the start of this thread in March 2013: when I click the check-mark too save a note I sometimes lose all updates since the previous auto-save. I am using a Nexus 7 running android 4.4. The message that comes up says "saving note x to notebook y". There is no error message.

What has not been mentioned previously in this thread: I have used the free version of Evernote since 2010 without a problem. This week I upgraded to the premium version. Since upgrading, Evernote has lost all my updates on three different occasions.

 

Suggest you raise a support ticket and post the number here...