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.