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Duplicate Notes Issue


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Well just before these last recent posts, that frankly came as a bit if a surprise to me, I was going to post to ask if everyone now agreed that the problem was gone haha

Evidently not.

However I personally seem to have more luck these days on the same old chromebook that I was complaining about before. I often work on 4g WiFi hotspot from my phone in various countries and the connection is never stable. But I haven't seen a duplicated note in about 2 months. That is with my desktop at home online with win client open and evernote on my android open too, while working on evernote web (new) on my chromebook. 

This leads me to believe that maybe the issue possibly was solved by an update by chrome... No idea but seems possible. 

@gazumped fair enough about a secondary word editor, but I find this annoying as for a paying customer this takes away half the functionality of the evernote product. 

My temporary solution the last week's was to start using Dropbox paper (which is solid) for lengthy writing on notes I had to return to and use evernote mainly for scans and one-time jots. But I'm looking forward to getting back now to evernote for all my writing! 

Let's see I'm logging in now. I dare u dupe note.

 

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  • 4 months later...

Where's the employees? Post hasn't been tended to for a few months, I'm suprised this topic is from 2014 and this is still not fixed completely. 

 

I am having duplicate notes being made when I make an edit on mobile, or when I make an edit on web and it doesn't show up on my mobile. 

If it doesn't update right away, which it never does, I log out log back in/refresh the page and it duplicates the note. This is proving extremely irritating and I'm wondering if this will be fixed soon? I'm going to go ahead and switch apps otherwise, I was excited to see you have created a webapp for evernote but this is really frustrating. 

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21 hours ago, nwee said:

Where's the employees? Post hasn't been tended to for a few months,

Evernote employees don't respond unless they have something to say.  The issue of duplicates is still around - particularly for web-based working on slow and intermittent connections.  The best protection against this issue is to use an app that saves to the local device as far as possible,  and to attach the file and/ or copy&paste the content into a note to save it.

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This is definitely still an issue. My Internet is sometimes sketchy and since I'm on Linux on my laptop on the weekends I must use the Web interface. As a Web developer I would think Evernote could conceive of a better response for this when it detects there is not a connection. Since the problem requires little to replicate (it happens to me reliably every weekend when I work on notes on my laptop, sometimes creating 10 to 20 copies per note) it cannot be rare. Evernote cannot presume that all users have perfect Internet in order to use the product. I'm just coming back to using Evernote but the duration of this thread is disheartening for what appears to be a trivial issue.

It would be helpful to know if this is being worked on, or is some kind of priority for Evernote.

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On 30/07/2017 at 7:12 PM, Sherrie Fuqua said:

I would think Evernote could conceive of a better response for this when it detects there is not a connection.

If it's receiving a second-hand (via a browser) stream of data which stops,  I'd think it's a bit difficult for the server to do anything about it...  No idea what technical options might exist,  but my approach with something that doesn't work well is - find a way around it.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Ubuntu 16.04. Firefox 54.0.

I just wrote a note over the course of about 10 minutes and ended up with about 100 different versions representing historical snapshots of the note as it was being written. That's bad enough, but now I can't seem to find a way to delete the 99 older versions of the note that I don't want to appear in my notebook.

I have a fast (fibre) internet connection and no obvious drop-outs. This was not a collaborative note; only I had access. I also did not have Evernote open in any other applications or tabs, to the best of my knowledge.

Fixes, suggestions or work-arounds for the (Ubuntu) web UI would be very welcome. Thanks.

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22 hours ago, stuwat said:

That's bad enough, but now I can't seem to find a way to delete the 99 older versions of the note that I don't want to appear in my notebook.

Hmmn.  What's preventing the deletion?

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Hi Gazumped.

Sorry for any confusion. It was possible to delete individual notes in the web interface, but it was not possible to select multiple notes and delete them in bulk.

The former option would have been laborious, so I instead opened Evernote with the Android app, where it was possible to select and delete up to 20 at a time. Fortunately I had over estimated how many historical snapshot notes were generated -- there were in fact about 40 -- so I only had to do this twice.

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Well I only managed to do the necessary bulk delete because I had an Android device lying around. I would have been stuck otherwise.

The real issue of Evernote generating multiple notes from one note -- not duplicates but historical snaphots -- has not been resolved. I am just waiting to see if it happens again in the hope that I can replicate it and identify the conditions that caused it.

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10 hours ago, stuwat said:

I am just waiting to see if it happens again in the hope that I can replicate it and identify the conditions that caused it.

Unfortunately this issue has existed since 2014 and Evernote have shown very little interest in resolving it.

I posted a rough overview of what seemed to be causing it in 2015 here 

And then in 2016 a more detailed description of the process and possible solutions here 

 

The short version is that I think xhr requests are arriving out of order and the backend blindly applies them in the order it receives them. If you're on wifi your connection might be quietly reconnecting in the background, that was a problem I was having with the Realtek Linux drivers at the time.

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This issue just happened again. I'm on a VPN in a coffee shop and for some reason the WiFi connection was lost, requiring me to reconnect with the VPN. Multiple versions of the note I was working on were generated and I even lost some work in the process.

I was seriously considering upgrading my Evernote account (my last subscription lapsed), but now I am looking at other solutions for my notes instead. Until there is an app for Ubuntu or this problem with the web UI is resolved, I cannot rely upon Evernote.

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7 hours ago, stuwat said:

I was seriously considering upgrading my Evernote account (my last subscription lapsed), but now I am looking at other solutions for my notes instead. Until there is an app for Ubuntu or this problem with the web UI is resolved, I cannot rely upon Evernote.

Yep, I let my subscription lapse, too.

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OK - so if you're connecting to a cloud service via a browser and the connection drops while information is unsent or only partially sent to the remote server,  can anyone suggest what the provider can do about it? 

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Hi,
As a new customer of Evernote, I have just discovered this bug by using Evernote Web clipper in Chrome (Win 10, 60.0.3112.90) with a low Internet connection. Very annoying! 

And by reading the different posts of this thread, I'm quite astonished that this problem exists from 3 years!

As a new customer, I'm not very confident in the product so... Are there other bugs I should know before migrating all my notes to Evernote?

Best regards,
Alex

 

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5 hours ago, gazumped said:

OK - so if you're connecting to a cloud service via a browser and the connection drops while information is unsent or only partially sent to the remote server,  can anyone suggest what the provider can do about it? 

I went into some detail in my 2006 post linked just above. To reiterate, possibly more clearly... :-)

  • Include a session-specific hash and a sequence number in each XHR update sent by the browser
  • At the server:
    • only ever create a duplicate note if "last-edited-by-hash" does NOT match the new update's session hash (ie, two concurrent apps/tabs: user is on their own)
    • If an update arrives out-of-order (ie, has a lower sequence than last-edited-by), discard it (since we already have a more recent edit applied).

If they do shard updates (ie, they send the changed parts of the note back to the server, which I'm pretty sure they do) then track sequences at the shard-level rather than the document level. If shards don't have fixed or deterministic boundaries this might be non-trivial.

There are performance issues to consider in doing this (it requires an aspect of "state" at the backend which can cause scalability issues), but it should be possible to manage that either with a key-value cache (like, say, Redis) with TTLs or at the near-DB level (since the db will have enough info to make the choice locally without a round-trip). It could also be solved by having the browser collect timestamped acknowledgements and intelligently submitting overriding edits if it sees out-of-order applications but that would be pretty kludgy.

There are plenty of web apps where this problem doesn't happen (google docs, anyone?). It is not some magical problem with cloud services that we just have to put up with - it is something every XHR-heavy web service has to deal with and (perhaps to varying degrees), most do - it's simply a bug and evernote are failing to fix it.

Maybe it's more complicated because of something in their architecture (or politics), but they've shown little sign of actively working on the issue so occam's razor suggests that for whatever reason, they simply don't care "enough". The first year or so perhaps they were banking on the new web interface fixing it. Maybe the new web interface isn't as maintainable as they hoped, or they're having trouble deploying incremental improvements. Maybe the percentage of paying users who use the web interface is too low to prioritise corner cases like this. I'd suggest they think about potential paying users who try out the web interface first before installing a native client - the admittedly small handful of posters in this thread who were paying clients that then dropped their subscriptions would be indicative of a wider number of lost customers. Perhaps that number of customers just isn't economically significant, hard to say.

I could easily be missing something that makes this issue less trivial, but then I've only had a few years to ponder it and can only do so from the outside :-)

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OK - thanks for the explanation.  I actually understand some of the issues.  You're right,  of course,  that a company's reaction to user feedback is mainly governed by how much action vs inaction will cost.  $10,000 to fix and we'll lose 10 users?  Low priority.  1,000 complaints on that issue and things begin to look different...

Also.  There's the magical 'common editor' - since Evernote originally developed all the individual OS clients independently,  fixing one issue meant doing that half a dozen times in Android / Mac / iOS / Windows / Web since they were all coded differently.  They spent the last four(?) years developing a new module so that 1) it interfaced with all OS's and 2) any fix was a once-only deal. 

The web was something else again.  AFAIK the original 'classic' web version was developed sometime before 2008 and everything has changed a bit since then.  There was some talk about junking the original code and rewriting it for 'early' this year,  but hey - it's August.  Maybe something's in train,  maybe it's not.  The only folks who know wear green a lot (you know who you are :P) and they shouldn't talk about it.

It's been said here before that rewriting existing, working code to update it is not the best idea.  Maybe Evernote is just finding that out (again).

As usual, all we can do is wait.  <_<

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Ok, now I'm getting this problem on a daily basis. I'm not having conectivity issues at all. This is in fact the only web app that's making this kind of problems to me.

This is making Evernote almost impossible to use. I have to check manually wich is the last version of the note, or I'll lose changes.

Tried switching to Onenote, but they don't have the avility to sort notes by modification date. If anyone can suggest a good alternative (not Keep, since I can't migrate), I would appreciate it.

Hope Evernote realize this before people start going into other apps.

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4 minutes ago, Serknor said:

Ok, now I'm getting this problem on a daily basis. I'm not having conectivity issues at all. This is in fact the only web app that's making this kind of problems to me.

This is making Evernote almost impossible to use. I have to check manually wich is the last version of the note, or I'll lose changes.

Tried switching to Onenote, but they don't have the avility to sort notes by modification date. If anyone can suggest a good alternative (not Keep, since I can't migrate), I would appreciate it.

Hope Evernote realize this before people start going into other apps.

If you've not already reported this,  contact support - the more traffic they get,  the more likely there will be a fix soon.

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50 minutes ago, Xenobius said:

Ha, I solved the problem completely.... I just use google docs!

Yeah but does Google Docs have a forum for you to post bohoo posts?

Anyways, good bye, good luck

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6 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Yeah but does Google Docs have a forum for you to post bohoo posts?

Anyways, good bye, good luck

It doesn't need one because it actually works! And seeing how Evernote never bothered about replying to any of these posts... I wonder why you still bother! I used to love Evernote so before you think you can just bohoo me, think about the reason why I posted this!

 

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hace 19 horas, Xenobius dijo:

It doesn't need one because it actually works! And seeing how Evernote never bothered about replying to any of these posts... I wonder why you still bother! I used to love Evernote so before you think you can just bohoo me, think about the reason why I posted this!

 

I used to love Evernote too. When all my friends were swtiching from Evernote to Keep (because they all had this same issue) I stayed, hoping it will get fixed. Today, I have to admit they were right. I will switch to Nimbus ( it's not as powerful as Evernote, but it has all I need: Multi-platform, Search, Import from Evernote, Sort by modification date, Tags, etc ). If some day Evernote decides to fix this problem I'll be back.

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16 hours ago, alex_ever said:

I just clipped some web pages, and this time no articles were saved at all!!!

What the hell!!!

 

This post seems to pre-date some others that we dealt with elsewhere.  I hope your issue is now resolved.

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  • 1 month later...

It's Sep 2017...i still get this damn issue..it's really frustrating...takes hell lot of time to make a 100 words note...this thread started in 2014...issue still there...

I use evernote from my web browser...

Evernote for MAC doesn't work..all its buttons are blurred..u can't use it..i was only left with web version, but even that keeps making duplicate notes..

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hace 22 horas, Krishna Das dijo:

It's Sep 2017...i still get this damn issue..it's really frustrating...takes hell lot of time to make a 100 words note...this thread started in 2014...issue still there...

I use evernote from my web browser...

Evernote for MAC doesn't work..all its buttons are blurred..u can't use it..i was only left with web version, but even that keeps making duplicate notes..

Well.. It's a shame, since I really loved Evernote. I'm not saying this to bash it, but I then started searching another service to replace it.

If this work for you, this is what I tried:

I tried OneNote, but it doesn't sort notes by last modification
I wanted to use Keep ( because I use Google services a lot, and I'm an android user ) but it doesn't allow importing from Evernote
So I settled down with Nimbus Note, from Everhelper. It's simple.. it doesn't have all the same features as Evernote, and it's kinda new so it's not perfectly polished, but it works pretty similiar to it. It is multiplatform, and it allows importing from Evernote. It's free, it only has a monthtly data transfer limitation ( It's a big one so I never reach it). The only moment when you might reach it is when importing everything from Evernote in the same month, that's why I suggest importing it splitted in different moths ( you can export multiple backup files from Evernote ).

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I'm getting this too. Web client, using Firefox (54.0, 64 bit) on Linux (Ubuntu Creator's Edition, fully up to date).

There's only one browser window, with one tab open on Evernote (apart from the tab open on this forum). About four minutes ago, it created no less than ten copies of the document I've been editing for an hour, in addition to the one I'm actively editing. I'd do a screencap for you, but it's got sensitive client information in it - sorry.

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So for the recent posters in September and October...

  1. Is there any possibility of your using the installed desktop client?  A complete absence of duplicates is guaranteed!
  2. Failing that,  can you use a local word processor or notepad app to create / edit your documents?  Save the work in progress locally,  but attach the original finished document to a note.  Reopen and edit from there if necessary.  Again,  no duplicates.
  3. The problem,  as @Jchristopher1987 suggests,  seems to be that whenever the web application 'loses' the connection,  it assumes your edit is complete and saves the note version to that point.  When the connection resumes and breaks again,  the save repeats - and so on... 

Unfortunately I don't see a way that  Evernote's servers can know that your session should be kept open when they're connecting through third party software like a browser,  which -for its own security reasons- seriously restricts what web-based apps can get up to on your local device.

By all means raise a support request* if you think the situation could or should be resolved,  but I don't see any fixes being available anytime soon.

https://www.evernote.com/SupportLogin.action if you're a paying customer,  tweet https://twitter.com/evernotehelps if not.

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1 - People who use a web client, use it in different computers, that's the idea behind it.

2 - Using an external word processor is too much work. Google drive would be much more practical than that.

3 - If the web client loses connection, and saves the note... why does it create a new one? The app knows by an internal id that you are editing the very same note. It makes no sense. I repeat, I've tried a few other apps, with the same stable connection, and none of them does this.

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Hi @gazumped. In response to your recent post:

  1. As far as I know, there is still no desktop client for Linux.
  2. You describe a viable work-around, but if Evernote is then effectively being used for saving text files and can't actually provide a note-taking service, it's not a productivity tool but is more effort than it is worth.

 

 

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I appreciate work-arounds aren't a cure,  but they do allow you to avoid some negative effects and maybe work more efficiently than otherwise. 

You may be able to get something more contructive from Evernote - I'm just another user making a suggestion.  I find the Browser version much less useful than the installed desktop option (if you have one).  However from time to time posters here have commented that they didn't realise that was available.  So for completeness and other readers,  I included it.

I have used the 'work in a text editor and save the file' method which - beyond the need to remember to do that - is pretty transparent as an 'extra' step.  A refinement is that the file content can be copy pasted into the note body to be search indexed.  There are other ways to achieve the same ends.

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My experience the past year has been good but yesterday as I was typing a sentence, I got 5 duplicate notes. Some notes had been split on the same word in the sentence. I saw the extra notes and because I knew where I was typing the sentence, I was easily able to find the note with the completed sentence and delete the others. (I added "KEEP" to the title of the best one.) Not too bad of an experience but I thought the scenario might be interesting to share.

>>1. Is there any possibility of your using the installed desktop client?  A complete absence of duplicates is guaranteed!

No in this case I was using Linux and the area of my work requires Linux. I also use the macbook client and it works very well.

>>2. Failing that,  can you use a local word processor or notepad app to create / edit your documents?  Save the work in progress locally,  but attach the original finished document to a note.  Reopen and edit from there if necessary.  Again,  no duplicates.

Not in this case. I was adding one sentence to an old note. It is true I could have written the one sentence elsewhere and cut/pasted into evernote, but I thought I typed it pretty quickly, about 15 seconds duration.

>>3. The problem,  as @Jchristopher1987 suggests,  seems to be that whenever the web application 'loses' the connection,  it assumes your edit is complete and saves the note version to that point.  When the connection resumes and breaks again,  the save repeats - and so on... 

It is a great hypothesis, but to create duplicates breaking even less than one second apart as I type seems very odd. Maybe there is an easy improvement on the client web side just by adding a small timeout between sends.

 

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@gazumped, if you could point me towards the Linux desktop client, I would be most obliged.

Regarding web client session management: this is not exactly rocket science. (Trust me on this. I've done rocket science.) Even the Quora.com platform - which suffers often from 504 Gateway Timeout problem due to slightly ropey servers - stores each change in real time, and can return to a previous session, character-perfect. The fact that Evernote sometimes stores a succession of ten or more duplicate notes within seconds is a bug, pure and simple.

And as for editing in a word processor, and then copying into Evernote: for me, the whole point of Evernote is that it reliably stores my notes in real time, and if something like a sudden power failure or crash happens, I've lost nothing. That's not a work-around. If I wanted to do that, I might as well just be creating Word documents and saving them to a Dropbox folder.

Sorry if this reads as aggressive. I'm not annoyed at you, I'm annoyed at Evernote for putting me in the situation where I have to consider these kinds of workarounds to avoid the dumb bug that's filling notebooks with duplicate notes I have to sort through to find the most current version.

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@Jon Green - no problem;  frustrations understood.  It's another one of those 'if it were easy,  they would (should) have fixed it by now' thngs.  Evernote don't share anything from behind the scenes,  so their views and any possible actions towards improving the situation remain pure speculation...

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  • 3 months later...

My Evernote has done this twice recently. I write a note, then all of a sudden evernote makes like 8 copies of it. It's really making me not trust evernote, which is a shame because I use it for a lot of my work.

It only happens when I'm using the web version of evernote.

Combined with the very poor search function in the updated evernote app, it's making me think I'll find an alternative program to use soon.

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Each week, I delete 20 to 30 duplicate notes. I have no idea why Evernote duplicates notes but it is very frustrating and confusing. We have multiple users using these notes and I know we have lost important information because of these duplicates. We do nothing but open the notes and type. Evernote somehow duplicates these notes all on its own. Annoying.

 

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Hi. 

On 1/20/2018 at 9:14 PM, Jesoski said:

We have multiple users using these notes

 

On 1/20/2018 at 9:14 PM, Jesoski said:

We do nothing but open the notes and type

You may be confusing the socks off the application...

Evernote works by syncing local devices to their server.  If one device changes a note,  then that change is synced back to the server and out again to all devices connected to the same account.  This,  as you can imagine,  takes a little time - maybe 15-20 minutes before the data from local device A reaches device B.  If two devices with the same access to the account change the same note within that time,  Evernote may not know which is the "latest" version,  so saves both so that no data is lost.

If the devices are connected to separate Evernote Basic accounts and the notes on which they're working are shared between them,  there's some protection (note locking) against the same note being opened by two users simultaneously.

If the devices all use the same account login,  the app sees all the devices as being the 'same' person - one user with many devices,  sending changes to multiple notes.  No note locking will apply.

I'd suggest you look at Evernote's Slack integration,  which might help you normalise things,  but in general I'm afraid you're just abusing software which was never intended to manage your particular use case.

How to use Evernote for Slack

How does sync work within Evernote?

How to troubleshoot syncing issues

How to access and use note history

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The problem of multiple duplicate notes is there even if you are using evernote from one device at the time. It's just a bug, nothing more, with no excuse at all. I've moved to another cross-device app and never experienced this problem again.

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22 hours ago, gazumped said:

maybe 15-20 minutes before the data from local device A reaches device B. 

yea @gazumped that seems a little long with 15-20- mins. #1 I've never experienced anything longer than 30 seconds after finishing or deleting a note on my desktop and opening the app on my phone, as i walk out the door, to see the update. I'd say that syncing is, over the last years, pretty much instant or at most 1 min between devices. #2 on the other hand i strongly doubt this has anything to do with the duplicate note issue.

The duplicate notes issue is a nasty bug that Evernote needs to fix. With the software development and tech around at this point in time, this should not be something we have to live with using a software from a big company like Evernote.

Can you imagine if i had duplicate files with Dropbox, using it on 3 laptops, two desktops and two phones, including sharing with clients?? that would be an absolute disaster! But luckily that never happens. Dropbox and Dropbox paper syncs easily without duplication or any worry for such behavior, even if WiFi was to cut out for a short or long while.

Evernote needs to wake up to the fact that this is sub-standard! 

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17 hours ago, dflamholc said:

The duplicate notes issue is a nasty bug that Evernote needs to fix.

It's really not a 'bug' in the context of the comment I was answering.  Multiple users are changing notes - possibly with the same ID as the owner of the account.  Evernote has no way to tell which of the edits it sees is the latest version,  so saves both.  The alternative would be to potentially dump one or the other version - which might actually be the correct one.  I agree the issue of duplicates when using the web browser on a dodgy connection needs to be fixed.  Many users with access to one account is a different topic which we should maybe take elsewhere...

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4 hours ago, gazumped said:

Many users with access to one account is a different topic which we should maybe take elsewhere...

I see your point, but is it really tho? I mean again, other 'similar' apps out there can handle this flawlessly with loads of people accessing the same notes and editing live.

And what makes me actually think that it is 'the same' issue, is the fact that it produces this uncontrolled duplication of notes. I remember back in the day i used to sometimes get a 'new notebook' called Note Conflicts or similar, where some notes for some reason couldn't sync properly with the server. So, one or worst case two orphaned notes where left in there. That was a lot more manageable tho than this spitting out of up to 20-30 duplicated with no annotation from the Evernote system of what is actually going on.

Even if there were too many people working on the same note, shouldn't there be a clear Error delivered? and the 1 or two duplicate notes saved with a time stamp and error info? 

 

 

 

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OK - Log four friends into your account on separate devices (no fair using the web at this stage) and get them all to look at the same note at the same time.  Have them type something random but different and sync the note.  You might get away with one or two changes making it onto the server,  but the more people involved,  the more likely you are to have that same note arriving at Evernote from two auth'd devices with two completely separate and different changes made within seconds of each other. 

How's a poor app to decide which of your changes to accept?  The default at the moment is to save everything and duplicate the note(s).  But in this scenario Evernote thinks you've split into four separate people and all the 'yous' are making equally credible but different changes. 

I don't know if this is actually what was happening in that particular query - still waiting for the person who raised it to come back with details.  But IMHO lots of folks logged into the same account is different from one person being logged in but mysteriously generating duplicates. 

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 4 months later...

Hi, this is happening for me. I have three copies of the same note. If I try to delete the duplicates, they are recreated within a few seconds.

Running only in Evernote Desktop, note is not shared

Version 67.0.3396.99 (Official Build) (64-bit) on Mac OS X High Sierra 10.13.5

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 7/10/2018 at 2:07 PM, Mina Demian said:

Hi, this is happening for me. I have three copies of the same note. If I try to delete the duplicates, they are recreated within a few seconds.

Running only in Evernote Desktop, note is not shared

Version 67.0.3396.99 (Official Build) (64-bit) on Mac OS X High Sierra 10.13.5

Hi
today I have exactly the same problem and from web client was not possible delete the duplicated notes but only from tablet version

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  • 3 weeks later...
4 hours ago, Jeff@mobilebizsystems.com said:

I have this issue also where I have random duplicates.  I wish there was an audit trail to see how it happened.  If I upgrade to the paid service would they be able to see?

nope I've been paying for years now and its not even possible to have a proper conversation with pro support.. hence we moan here instead. 

I just rediscovered the duplicate note issue these last couple of weeks as I moved back into my flat after my tenant left and I'm now borrowing wifi from my neighbour via a network booster. the wifi is fast but cuts out from time to time.. every single app works fine with these cutouts, apart from evernote which decides to uncontrollably (in a rather manic fashion) duplicate the current note.

Honestly is there no figgin coder/developer in the whole of evernote organisation that can be tasked with sorting this issue??? its a bit of a joke now after all these years... 

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  • 2 months later...

I keep getting duplicate of notes that are not shared, in an un-shared notebook. First Evernote wanted us to ignore that on its way to "providing great formatting features" it doesn't handle unformatted text properly and now this.. I've been using software that "saves something to the internet and back" since late 90's and I don't recall a similar behavior of an app effectively jeopardizing content "due to <excuse>".

Recently I've wasted possibly hours on loading duplicates into a text comparator (Notepad++) to avoid messing up really important information by continuing with edits in the wrong note. Because the "duplicates" are not really duplicates! They are notes differing with the last edit or few edits!

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33 minutes ago, rimboma said:

They are notes differing with the last edit or few edits!

So you're correct;  they're not duplicates,  they're notifications of conflicting edits where Evernote is being confused by a web browser connection,  or by editing a note from two devices - or in some cases by two people editing the note at the same time with the same login. 

If you're using the web version of Evernote you can avoid the issue by using another editor or word processor to create the text,  then cut and paste into the note and attach the WP file to the same note.  Further edits can be done anywhere that software is available by opening the note attachment. 

If you're editing on a tablet and a desktop,  just make sure you sync the app both before and after any changes,  so that you're not adding text to a note which is then 'updated' with an earlier version of the note from another device when it automatically syncs.  Two edits from the same user means Evernote can't decide which is the correct information,  so it creates another note.

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17 hours ago, gazumped said:

So you're correct;  they're not duplicates,  they're notifications of conflicting edits where Evernote is being confused by a web browser connection,  or by editing a note from two devices - or in some cases by two people editing the note at the same time with the same login. 

If you're using the web version of Evernote you can avoid the issue by using another editor or word processor to create the text,  then cut and paste into the note and attach the WP file to the same note.  Further edits can be done anywhere that software is available by opening the note attachment. 

If you're editing on a tablet and a desktop,  just make sure you sync the app both before and after any changes,  so that you're not adding text to a note which is then 'updated' with an earlier version of the note from another device when it automatically syncs.  Two edits from the same user means Evernote can't decide which is the correct information,  so it creates another note.

To clarify: My test notes are not shared, and are in an un-shared notebook, plus: edited on a single device (Web). So we're left with "confused by a web browser connection". As I stated already, I do not consider it a valid cause. Especially that Evernote Web relies on a mindfield-like mechanism of instantaneous syncing, exposing to all possible risks without taking advantage of the single existing advantage of the mechanism.

I do use an external editor now and I highly recommend the multitab, autosaving Notepad++ (unformatted text only) but it's a freaking patchwork as far as the whole situation goes.

BTW, I've been using Evernote Web since inception for a year or so and I don't recall such problems in its infancy.

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1 hour ago, rimboma said:

I do not consider it a valid cause

It may or may not be valid - I'm not qualified to argue the technical aspects,  though it seems to me that web browsers are increasingly reluctant to allow web pages to steal much in the way of resources from the host device on account of zombie networks and similar unfriendly threats.  So Evernote has to rely on whatever resources the browser will provide.  Plus both browser and Evernote are reliant on a steady connection between the device and the remote server to maintain syncing and storage for the note content.  One serious break in the chain,  and.. problems arise.

Not offering that as an explanation or an excuse,  but I've had that experience in many forums (fora?) that involve web forms for communication,  including this one. 

Not saying that Evernote couldn't or shouldn't change their process and fix it.  But realistically,  alongside the thousand other urgent things that we users want them to sort out (and the 225M people,  many of whom use their account on a daily basis and would be very very unhappy to have the syncing process go wrong,  even slightly...) I can see why this might be on a "let's think carefully about this" pile.

Meantime,  wearing my practical hat,  the way to avoid any and all dropouts is to minimise the time Evernote spends connected to a note open for editing - hence the third party editor.  I have Notepad++ too,  and agree it's great;  but I tend to use Google Docs for my temporary notes - there's a document there called 'temp' for that reason - so I don't have  duplicates or different versions of content cluttering up my hard drive.

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  • 4 months later...

This still happens using the latest Evernote Windows app.  You click on a note and an empty note with a duplicate title is created below it each time.  Discouraging that it has been 4 years and you still can't get this worked out.  This is why I feel apathetic about purchasing a subscription. 

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17 hours ago, Proft said:

This still happens using the latest Evernote Windows app

Hi.  You're posting in the Web client forum,  and AFAIK this doesn't happen in the installed app - certainly hasn't happened to me in 8+ years of subscribing...

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  • 1 year later...

In reading through this, it is surprising that the issue hasn't been resolved in 7 years.   Despite having a very stable connection, my notes using the web gets duplicated quite often.  For example, in the space of a one hour of note taking, it duplicated twice.  Do I assume given the lack of urgency, this problem will not ever be resolved?

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On 1/20/2021 at 11:31 AM, CJO said:

In reading through this, it is surprising that the issue hasn't been resolved in 7 years.   Despite having a very stable connection, my notes using the web gets duplicated quite often.  For example, in the space of a one hour of note taking, it duplicated twice.  Do I assume given the lack of urgency, this problem will not ever be resolved?

I'm glad I'm not the only one following this 7 year old issue. In one hour my note duplicated 6 times. As old as this issue is, I'm glad there's other competitors with Web Clippers. Only thing keeping me subscribed to Evernote at this point is the code blocks.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yesterday my note literally duplicated over 70 times.  It was really disruptive.  Once or twice perhaps was manageable, but it was bizarre watching this continue to duplicate.  I hate to transition to someone else, but I may not have a choice.

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2 minutes ago, CJO said:

Yesterday my note literally duplicated over 70 times.  It was really disruptive.  Once or twice perhaps was manageable, but it was bizarre watching this continue to duplicate.  I hate to transition to someone else, but I may not have a choice.

Hi.  Can you give us more detail of your OS / Evernote version and how this note was being created?  Was it a clip,  or something you were editing?  And on how many devices was Evernote active at the time?

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When I click the "solution" link to go to Feb. 21, 2016 (!!), it tells me to click another link (which I will call Link 2) and then click a counter to show that I'm suffering from this issue.

When I click Link 2, I get a "you do not have permission to view this content" error and there is no counter to click.

The "Solution" is NOT a solution.

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same here, editing a note in web client a) does not save edits AT ALL, and b) keeps creating duplicates - all same copies, with no newly added edits saved. It was not this bad few weeks or months ago, not web client is literally unusable.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 months later...

Web client (10.14.7) user here on Chrome Version 90.0.4430.93 (Official Build) (64-bit) on Fedora 34 Linux.

I have a good internet connection - DSL at home.

Generally, I like to have several tabs with different notes open at any one time. Recently I find that I get rapid note duplication when I edit a note.

If I close all Evernote tabs but one, and work only ion that note, then I don't tend to get any duplication.

None of the notes I'm talking about are shared.

I'm close to jumping the Evernote ship completely now... it's really getting in the way of me getting my work done.

 

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49 minutes ago, RichardG63 said:

I'm close to jumping the Evernote ship completely now... it's really getting in the way of me getting my work done.

You may be an atypical web user -  I tend to have one note or two notes open in their own window from a Windows desktop client,  plus the client itself.  Multiple notes open in multiple,  probably sandboxed,  web windows may be like having several users working on the same account at the same time,  hence duplications.  Evernote may not even be aware that this is an issue if no-one has raised a support ticket.  I'd suggest reporting it yourself to see if there's anything they can help with...

https://help.evernote.com/hc/requests/new

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I doubt that multiple open notes in web client is atypical use @gazumped. Also, it was working find until recently. I've been using the web client intensely for the last 12 months or so. Probably a cache/cookie issue.

I've submitted a support ticket.

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