Best practices for resolving past conflicting changes

[bounce 74]

I have 95 notes with conflicting changes,  possibly caused by an automated system I set up to append text to certain notes via e-mailing it in.

From here, what's the best practice to figure out what text is different? I've searched "conflicting modification" within Evernote and some of these notes have at least 10 of those within one note, and these notes are VERY long. 

So, do I have to cmd-f in each note to go to the "conflicting modification" section where it duplicates the note, and then find the text at the top that is different, then delete the text that has been duplicated by Evernote when there was a conflict? 

I've tried putting the full note's text into sublime text and finding duplicate lines, but the problem is with this method Sublime Text alphabetizes each line of text and the original note was painstakingly prioritized like a book. 

I now am keeping many smaller notes and linking to each at the top with note links, along with obsessively hitting the sync button on desktop and mobile. My concern now is, how to keep the structure of the notes and only find the duplicated text? Please discuss 

 

 

 

 

[DTLow 5,736]

9 minutes ago, bounce said:

find the duplicated text? Please discuss 

A user in another discussion suggested this site for resolving conflicting text https://www.diffchecker.com

[bounce 74]

7 minutes ago, DTLow said:

A user in another discussion suggested this site for resolving conflicting text https://www.diffchecker.com

Read about that one too, the thing is there needs to be some assurance that the site isn't retaining info. Self-hosted software would be ideal. Thank for the response!

Any other ideas?

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

3 hours ago, bounce said:

From here, what's the best practice to figure out what text is different? I've searched "conflicting modification" within Evernote and some of these notes have at least 10 of those within one note, and these notes are VERY long. 

Unfortunately, there is no easy process I know of to resolve conflicting notes, especially when the various versions are all in the same Note.

I have not had to deal with this issue in Evernote, but I have dealt with conflicting files.
So, here is a possible process, untested, that you can consider using:

1. Export (or copy/paste) each version of a Note to a file
   1. Use plain text if you don't care about the formatting in the note.  This will be much simpler to resolve.
   2. Use HTML file if you want to retain formatting
      1. I just tested using Export to HTML, and then drag/drop the file on EN in the Mac Doc
      2. This seems to work well
      3. So you could export to HTML each Note version
      4. For the Notes that contain multiple versions:
         1. After you create the first HTML file, create a copy for each version, then edit the copy and remove the other versions.
2. Use a  file compare tool to compare the versions
   1. I have used, and like, DeltaWalker 
   2. Select the file/version, or merge into a new file
3. Create a new Note with the selected version/merge
   EDIT 2016-03-13  18:02 CT
   1. Drag/Drop either a TXT file or HTML file onto the EN Mac Dock
      1. Just tested this, and it seems to work well
      2. The HTML format is preserved
      3. However, there could be issues if you had images and/or attachments in the original note.
4. Tag the original (now old) Notes with something like "OLD_VER"
   1. Keep the old versions until you are sure that the new selected version is what you want.
   2. In searches, you can exclude them with -tag:OLD_VER
   3. You could also move the old versions to a new Local Notebook.
   4. Export to ENEX the old versions just in case you need to recover them later.
   5. Delete the Notes with the old versions (would still be available in your EN Trash until you emptied the trash)

Good luck, and let us know how it goes.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

6 hours ago, JMichaelTX said:

Use a  file compare tool to compare the versions

1. I have used, and like, DeltaWalker 
2. Select the file/version, or merge into a new file

 

Here's another option, and it is free on the Mac:
TextWranger (free ver of BBEdit)

It has a very nice compare tool, and let's you easily merge differences.  Just open both files, select both files in the left panel, right-click and choose "Compare"

[bounce 74]

Appreciate that, definitely will give some of those tools a try. I think what I'll do is copy the first "section" of the note before the conflicting modifications to a new note in Evernote. That way I can use a compare tool on the rest of the text below that have the conflicting modifications, and this way all the note links and the sequence of the note will be preserved in the original part of the note before the conflicts. 

I've been looking at Onenote and how it has near perfect reviews on iOS, tempted to check it out for a while, but there isn't an exporter for OSX, yet. Evernote really needs to work out a way to reduce the friction with things like this because even though I've been a paying member for 8years and have have 15k notes, I'm tempted to check options. Thanks again 

[DunwoodyBob 1]

Agree w commentator in another forum... senseless that Evernote has not modified software to automatically resolve conflicts. Lotus Notes deployed this technology in the early 1990s (I know; I worked there). Can't tell me this tech can't be developed or procured.

[bounce 74]

I've had three conflicting notes in the past week that I wasnt clearly notified they were conflicting until the notes got too big to sync from ios. Text wrangler is good to resolve conflicts, but I build my notes in a very specific way like this: https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2015/12/11/evernote-and-the-brain-designing-creativity-workflows/

using text wrangler to resolve conflicts strips away some of the formatting i do per that blog post. I follow the best practices to sync as mentioned above and still get these conflicts. Many things about Evernote I love, however it is becoming extremely frustrating to work with. Is there an app or option in text wrangler to merge while preserving the  bold and highlights that I had in the Evernote note?

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

4 hours ago, bounce said:

Is there an app or option in text wrangler to merge while preserving the  bold and highlights that I had in the Evernote note?

The only thought that comes to mind is to export each conflicted Notes as HTML, and then do a file compare, using TextWrangler or other file compare tools.  Since the formatting is in the HTML code, it should be preserved.

[bounce 74]

I've spent the past hours thinking about the best solution for this. This is what I've come up with so far:

I'm no longer going to try to edit any notes longer than one scroll of the screen on ios, notes on mobile will *mostly* be read only. Editing a note with iphone or ipad is beyond frustrating due to: wild cursor jumps, inability to select text properly, regular conflicting modifications, lack of ability to adjust text size, etc. etc. etc.

What I'm doing with the notes that have conflicting modifications from mobile is:

1. select-all text from original desktop Evernote note.

2. put it in textwrangler

3. copy all text from this same note (mobile versions with conflicting changes) and paste this in the text wrangler note.

4. process duplicate lines in text wrangler and have unique lines saved to clipboard and next text wrangler document.

5. Within the Evernote desktop app, search to the first conflicting modification and shift-command-arrow down so it selects to the end of the text below that (preserving formatting in original note above this point). Delete the text that's selected.

6. Add the unique text from Text wrangler back into the note.

Hopefully that helps someone. I'm open to easier workflows as well. Cheers

 

 

 

[bounce 74]

15 minutes ago, JMichaelTX said:

The only thought that comes to mind is to export each conflicted Notes as HTML, and then do a file compare, using TextWrangler or other file compare tools.  Since the formatting is in the HTML code, it should be preserved.

Thanks, most of the osx tools like beyond compare and the one you mentioned look great, but 60 bucks for either is a bit steep for fixing something that shouldn't be happening so much in the first place. I was in the middle of posting the new way I'll be using EN  and workflow above. I'm pretty much done editing notes on ios. Text wrangler it is    have a good one.

[mbrianlars 0]

Does anyone have any updated news or tips on how to handle these conflicts?   Frankly, Evernote crashes so often, that I'm stuck with more synch problems and more conflicts than ever.  ...Surely, there has to be a way to handle Evernote conflicts within Evernote...without having to use another software to compare, etc, etc.  

[bounce 74]

Nothing internal to Evernote that fixes them. I still get them occasionally even following best practices and religiously manually syncing any device I'm on. I think they should have something in the UI that color codes only the text that is different from the original note. This is what I've been using: http://textmechanic.com/wp-content/uploads/source/Remove-Duplicate-Lines.html 

Though I know putting the text through someone's random webpage isn't ideal or even smart depending on the content.

 

[jefito 5,589]

25 minutes ago, bounce said:

This is what I've been using: http://textmechanic.com/wp-content/uploads/source/Remove-Duplicate-Lines.html 

How does this help with diffs between different instances of a note?  All that this does is remove blank or duplicate lines from a single file, which would be of extremely limited usefulness for the problem here. To do diffs, you need to use an actual file comparison program. I use Beyond Compare every day in my work life for source code diffs, and it's a great tool, great company. There are others. A few times, I've been able to use Beyond Compare on Evernote notes exported to ENML format, and it's saved my bacon a couple of times.

[bounce 74]

21 minutes ago, jefito said:

How does this help with diffs between different instances of a note?

In Evernote, when a conflicting modification occurs it doubles the content within the note. Within the doubled content below "conflicting modification"  Evernote adds the the text that was different.

So if you put the example paragraph below  into the website, then remove duplicate lines, you are left with the original note only and it strips out the "duplicate" text below the conflict and leaves on the part that was unique. After doing this, go back to Evernote and delete all content below the conflicting modification and add back only the unique part from that website. I've had notes with 12 conflicts and this is how I did it.

example:

According to the email sent to users, the bug can cause images and other attachments to be deleted under specific conditions, when using Evernote for Mac. The company claims only "a small number of people" have been impacted by the glitch, which occurs in the version of the Mac software released in September, and less frequently, in the versions released since this June.
In these applications, certain sequences of events can cause an image or other attachments to be deleted from notes without warning, but text is not affected. For example, the bug can be triggered by skimming quickly through a large number of notes, Evernote says.

According to the email sent to users, the bug can cause images and other attachments to be deleted under specific conditions, when using Evernote for Mac. The company claims only "a small number of people" have been impacted by the glitch, which occurs in the version of the Mac software released in September, and less frequently, in the versions released since this June.
In these applications, certain sequences of events can cause an image or other attachments to be deleted from notes without warning, but text is not affected. For example, the bug can be triggered by skimming quickly through a large number of notes, Evernote says.

This is conflicting information

 

[jefito 5,589]

1 hour ago, bounce said:

In Evernote, when a conflicting modification occurs it doubles the content within the note. Within the doubled content below "conflicting modification"  Evernote adds the the text that was different.

Hmm, I don't remember that behavior; it's been awhile. I just diffed the two conflicting versions exported as ENML. Good to know.