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Note history not visible after upgrading to Premium


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Posted

Hi from a new user, first time poster.

 

I upgraded to Premium last week, and expected to be able to see Note History for all my existing notes starting from the time I upgraded.  However, I seem to only be able to see histories for notes inside new notebooks created after the upgrade.  There is no history visible for existing notes, or new notes inside notebooks that existed pre-upgrade.  Is that normal, or am I missing something?

 

Is there a way to force the creation of note histories for existing notes/notebooks?  If no, what is the recommended strategy for migrating to Premium?  Please tell me I don't have to recreate all my notebooks...?!

 

Thanks in advance.

 

  • Level 5*
Posted

I wasn't aware that note history was selective in any way - are you sure the notes you've checked have a history?  Many of mine get created and viewed quite a lot,  bit don't get changed as such;  and this is what Note History is all about - viewing and (if necessary) stepping back to a previous version of the note after changes.

 

If you're not seeing history on your desktop machine,  try on the web client;  and if you're sure there's history missing I suggest a support ticket (see below) for further comment from Evernote.

  • 8 months later...
Posted

Note history is a critical feature that needs to be implemented consistently.  Programattically, if the Note (including the note Info screen, the tags, etc.) is an object, then the note history is simply a collection of read-only Note objects. In effect, the note object becomes a collection, with at least one child (the current note) and, potentially, as many children as needed (within the limits of storage).  This solves a lot of stuff - encrypting the note simply means encrypting the entire note collection object, for example.  Hardly any new coding required to include history in encryption.

 

See https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/30886-encryption-and-note-history/ for why this matters.

 

Wikipedia and the other Wiki's had this 100% right, and coded it from day 1.  Hopefully, Evernote can move towards the same in the next version.

 

Are attachments part of note history?  Ideally, yes; but for practical reasons, it may not be realistic to track every change to a multi-megabyte object. YMMV.

  • Level 5*
Posted

Note history is a critical feature that needs to be implemented consistently.  Programattically, if the Note (including the note Info screen, the tags, etc.) is an object, then the note history is simply a collection of read-only Note objects. In effect, the note object becomes a collection, with at least one child (the current note) and, potentially, as many children as needed (within the limits of storage).  This solves a lot of stuff - encrypting the note simply means encrypting the entire note collection object, for example.  Hardly any new coding required to include history in encryption.

See https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/30886-encryption-and-note-history/ for why this matters.

 

Wikipedia and the other Wiki's had this 100% right, and coded it from day 1.  Hopefully, Evernote can move towards the same in the next version.

 

Are attachments part of note history?  Ideally, yes; but for practical reasons, it may not be realistic to track every change to a multi-megabyte object. YMMV.

Not sure exactly what this means, or what encryption has to do with it. However:

1: There's no such thing as an encrypted note in Evernote. There is is only the notion of encrypted note sections, which may include the whole note text, but doesn't include attachments.

2: Note history, as I understand it, is only a collection of snapshots of a note over time. A particular section of a note may or may not be encrypted at a particular time that a snapshot is taken.

3. Attachments are a part of note history as far as I know; they certainly should be, as they may change over time as well.

 

So encrypting an entire note collection doesn't make much sense, as only pieces of notes are encrypted (and possibly not consistently over time), and attachments never are. 

Note histories could be implemented as a set of diffs, much like source control systems, which is a pretty well understood technology, and for stable notes will result in minimal storage overhead for the history. Actually, I'd be surprised if note histories weren't implemented like this already. The real question is when the diffs are obtained. Every save (for clients that support a save operation)? Every sync? On a timed basis?

Posted

[snip]

Note histories could be implemented as a set of diffs, much like source control systems, which is a pretty well understood technology, and for stable notes will result in minimal storage overhead for the history.

[snip]

Yep, it could be implemented as diffs.

 

What I am getting at is, the history of the ENTIRE note should be kept, particularly, the addition/removal of tags. Ideally, moving a note from one notebook to another would also be part of the note history, although this may not be practical as cross-notebook references would be tricky.

 

I also like Wikipedia's feature whereby you can optionally write a rationale for each change.  This text is not included in the main view of the note, but it would be accessable via the history screen.  That way, when user X modifies a note composed by user Y, Y can look at the history to see user X's rationale (maybe Y misunderstood the tag system, for example, or failed to follow the org's style guide for titles).  Meanwhile, other users who only care about the core content of the note don't have to look at all the clutter that would be there if X included the rationate in the main body of the note.

 

To the general reader: my earlier post probably only make sense if you are somewhat versed in object-oriented programming...and if you can't sleep on Xmas eve!

  • Level 5*
Posted

I think that the idea is now that note history is provided as a convenience, not as a complete audit trail of edits to the note. Then again, I don't understand how edits to shared notes figure into note history. Maybe as Evernote moves more into the business realm, they'd offer something like that, but distributed source control is pretty widely available already, for users who need that sort of thing.

 

I'm pretty well versed in the notion of object oriented programming (and other modes), and it wasn't that it didn't make sense to me, it just seemed like a flawed design in light of Evernote's current design/architecture.

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