help! all my notes are gone!

[Kate T 0]

Is there a backup? I was having trouble with sync and now everything is gone. I have daily notes for my mom's medical treatment for the last two weeks. I feel sick that I lost this.

[gazumped 11,663]

Have a look at your account in a browser via Evernote.com.  If you sign in and see your notes are still there,  obviously nothing has been lost,  we just need to get these onto your computer. 

 

If there are no notes,  or there are missing items,  please complete a support request (see below) and post the ticket number you'll be issued here.  We can flag that for a little priority attention,  given the medical connection...

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

1) Do you have a backup of your computer's hard drive (I should hope you do!), if so, your Evernote database should also have been backed up there and can be restored. Search the forums for restoring from a backup. 

Evernote does not have a user-facing backup system. My understanding is that clusters of servers are backed up and can be restored as clusters, but individual accounts cannot be restored. 

 

Any time you are dealing with any important data, it is your responsibility to ensure you have a proper backup plan in place. Never trust anybody to do this for you.

 

2) Are you entirely sure that you have not accidentally created and logged into a second, new, account on the device you noticed this?

 

3) When you log into the web interface at http://www.evernote.com, do you see your notes? If so, then you haven't lost data. If you do not see you notes, confirm that you have not logged into an accidentally-created second account. 

 

4) Have you check your trash notebook on any of your devices? It is usually the last notebook in the notebook list and it is called "trash".

 

5) What devices are you using Evernote on, and what versions of Evernote? 

[ab1kenobee 105]

Howdy.

 

I'd like to add to Scott's good recommendations:

 

I just suffered an EN calamity myself due to unresolved EN bugs, which may be helpful to you:

• SEE: SUCCESS: UNABLE TO REINSTALL | ERROR: "Already Installed by Another User"

 

 

1.  Like Scott and gazumped suggested, view EN online to evaluate notebook integrity status.

 

2.  If EN online looks good... then click on HELP... drop-down menu opens... 1/2 way down click on UPDATE.

Keeping EN current appears to be vitally important due to the application's interaction with CLOUD UPDATING (synching).

 

3.  If this proves unprofitable... take the time to research the EN FORUM prior to contacting SUPPORT.

This may prove to be laborious... however you might learn how to resolve the issue much faster and reliably than waiting for EN SUPPORT to putter around.

 

 

 

I hope this proves partially helpful.

 

Alan

[Wordsgood 526]

Scott, I understand the need to keep back-ups outside of Evernote, but your first point that from your understanding they cannot restore individual accounts...? I thought that aside from making your notes available on all your devices, Evernote also backed up our entire accounts, except for local (offline) notebooks?

What if some a catastrophic event like say, a fire that levels their home and loses/destroyd everything, including the back-ups?

1) Do you have a backup of your computer's hard drive (I should hope you do!), if so, your Evernote database should also have been backed up there and can be restored. Search the forums for restoring from a backup.

Evernote does not have a user-facing backup system. My understanding is that clusters of servers are backed up and can be restored as clusters, but individual accounts cannot be restored.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Scott, I understand the need to keep back-ups outside of Evernote, but your first point that from your understanding they cannot restore individual accounts...? I thought that aside from making your notes available on all your devices, Evernote also backed up our entire accounts, except for local (offline) notebooks?

What if some a catastrophic event like say, a fire that levels their home and loses/destroyd everything, including the back-ups?

 

1) Do you have a backup of your computer's hard drive (I should hope you do!), if so, your Evernote database should also have been backed up there and can be restored. Search the forums for restoring from a backup.

Evernote does not have a user-facing backup system. My understanding is that clusters of servers are backed up and can be restored as clusters, but individual accounts cannot be restored.

 

 

This: http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=962

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Scott, I understand the need to keep back-ups outside of Evernote, but your first point that from your understanding they cannot restore individual accounts...? I thought that aside from making your notes available on all your devices, Evernote also backed up our entire accounts, except for local (offline) notebooks?

What if some a catastrophic event like say, a fire that levels their home and loses/destroyd everything, including the back-ups?

1) Do you have a backup of your computer's hard drive (I should hope you do!), if so, your Evernote database should also have been backed up there and can be restored. Search the forums for restoring from a backup.

Evernote does not have a user-facing backup system. My understanding is that clusters of servers are backed up and can be restored as clusters, but individual accounts cannot be restored.

A couple of important distinctions. There is Evernote the Application, and Evernote the company.

Evernote the application, on a desktop device, stores the entire database locally. This can be backed up and restored from. I use a combination of local backups and offsite backups, if a fire or thief were to compromise my computers and their local backups, I'd have the offsite backup to fall back on.

Evernote the Company, as I understand, does not maintain backups of individual accounts, but of entire servers, or clusters of servers, each containing any number of users' data. I would have a hard time verifying where I got this info, I think some a post over a year ago where it was vaguely explained. The purpose of this would be to deal with server failures and not with problems associated with any given user. I imagine Evernote has a server or several servers go down, they can probably swap in new hardware and flash it with the backup and be up and running. This doesn't have much direct use for a single user, they can't call up a backup, find Wordsgood's data from 17/072014 and restore that.

That being said, if a fire came and wiped out your hardware and your backups (assuming you have only local backups), the data on Evernote's servers should be just fine, so when you use your mobile device which was not damaged, or install Evernote your new computer, you'll just pull the data down from Evernote's servers like normal.

The OPs problem is that for some reason she has lost her data perhaps due to user error, computer glitch, sync gaff, or some combination. In this case, if those changes were pushed to Evernote's servers, and then, the servers would reflect that changes, which in this case is the deletion of all of her notes. If she had even a local backup, she could restore from that. Evernote the company couldn't offer much help on this case because of my speculation above.

FYI I use Crashplan for my offsite backups for four machines, and i couldn't be happier, highly recommend.

[gazumped 11,663]

There's reams on backups on the net,  and how far you take it depends on your personal degree of risk;  but it's wise to have several sets of backups - the jargon is Grandfather,  Father, Son - so you can step back (if necessary) to a point before something bad happened.  If the bad event is a virus,  or bad disk sectors,  you may have suffered from that for a while before noticing,  so may have to go back to an earlier copy to get a correct one.  On the same basis you should not backup to your local hard drive - always embarrassing if it goes down and takes not only your original files but also all your backups with it.  Use removable media,  or an external hard drive,  or go for the cloud option(s) that are available.  (In Evernote's case you have some cover,  because there's the server version of your database if you need it.)

 

And yes,  if you do use removable media or an external HD,  you really should keep it somewhere else than next to your computer!  There are many options from friends and family members to bank vaults and professional advisers.  As I said - you fit the solution to your exposure and your personal preferences.

 

(And as I typed this I should have realised that GM would already have written the book on it...   )

[gazumped 11,663]

And Scott - proofreader note:  Berbers??

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

And Scott - proofreader note:  Berbers??

 

Berbers? Those are the backup servers stored in Terabithia (Backup + server = Berber).

 

A book? Not quite, but a few thoughts about backups from someone who has done a bunch. I think I am somewhere between the "average" user and the "enterprise" user -- a little more concerned about backups than most people, but too cheap and lazy to step up to an enterprise setup. At any rate, my data isn't all that interesting to other people, but it is the foundation of my career, so I need it, and I don't think I could ever put my career in the hands of someone else, no matter how good their intentions.

[Wordsgood 526]

Thank you, Gentlemen, for the extra clarification. As always, it is much appreciated!

GM, may I make a suggestion for the benefit of the forum? Would you consider making a *pinned* post outlining all your knowledge about the importance of, and how to, create and utilize if needed, back-ups?

Perhaps with a blunt post title like "Back-ups ARE IMPORTANT! - The Why & How." Or some variation of this to catch people's attention.

I know it's extra work for you and the zero pay sucks, but it might prove more effective than constantly referring folks to the confusing, incomplete, sometimes wrong and out-of-date KB. You could just lift and slightly modify stuff from your blog, and if you want to direct more EN traffic to it (your blog), you could add something in the post like:

For more information about XYZ (i.e. list and/or link to some or all of your other EN related blog posts), as well as anything else you'd care to draw attention to on your blog, at the bottom of the post. ☺ Pretty Please? I'm batting my baby blues at you....

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Oops! Im on the road relying on my iPad, so I'm sure you'll see even more fun typos over the next 10 days!

[Wordsgood 526]

Yay, I love funny typos!

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Thank you, Gentlemen, for the extra clarification. As always, it is much appreciated!

GM, may I make a suggestion for the benefit of the forum? Would you consider making a *pinned* post outlining all your knowledge about the importance of, and how to, create and utilize if needed, back-ups?

Perhaps with a blunt post title like "Back-ups ARE IMPORTANT! - The Why & How." Or some variation of this to catch people's attention.

I know it's extra work for you and the zero pay sucks, but it might prove more effective than constantly referring folks to the confusing, incomplete, sometimes wrong and out-of-date KB. You could just lift and slightly modify stuff from your blog, and if you want to direct more EN traffic to it (your blog), you could add something in the post like:

For more information about XYZ (i.e. list and/or link to some or all of your other EN related blog posts), as well as anything else you'd care to draw attention to on your blog, at the bottom of the post. ☺ Pretty Please? I'm batting my baby blues at you....

Good idea! I'm not terribly concerned about driving traffic to my blog, but I originally made the post on backups there because I have more control over the layout and so forth. I think if I started pinning everything I thought was important, we'd be in the thousands!

At one point I was collecting Evernote staff and blog gems (sometimes squirreled away in comments sections), but it was a little too time consuming. Ideally, we'd have a user manual cum best practices guide. I was writing one of those last year, but, again, time got the best of me

Thanks again for the kind words!

[ClearPOWER 0]

I have a similar problem:

  - I am working on a MacAir - IOS Mavericks 10.9.5

  - This morning I booted up the laptop and opened EV - all my files and notes are gone 

  - EV seemed to think it was my first time using EV and asked if I wanted a tour

  - When I look at the EV application history it says the app was created, modified, and last opened  on Thursday, Oct 30, 2014 (I have been using it way longer than that)

  - It says it's EV Version 5.7.0; I may have update EV then, would that have reset my account?

  - I do backup my computer religiously so I have a backup from last week.

  - I loged onto my account via a browser and all my files and notes are gone from there as well

  - WIERD THING - MY FILES AND NOTES ARE ON MY IPHONE 4S STILL.

  - Any thoughts on how I get my files and notes back into my account from my iPhone?

Many thanks,

[gazumped 11,663]

Sounds like you may have inadvertently created a new account - try signing out of your blank account,  and sign back in with the credentials you use on your iPhone.