LoveHateEvernote

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.

@gazumped, that's awesome!

Here is another thread from 2014 about the duplicate note issue: You can see it is still an active problem, and seems to be related to network connectivity. May I request that in your communication with EverNote, please suggest to that EverNote provide a "diff" functionality so users can easily resolve duplicate notes, and the related problem of conflicts. (Conflicts is the problem of getting the note content copied inside the same not, rather than separate notes.) There are several javascript diff libraries on github, so it seems a reasonable addition to EverNote web pages.

Fwiw, I had this problem a few months ago, but since then EverNote has been working well for me with no duplicate notes. I use the osx app, iPhone app, and chrome browser. Also no more problems with the separate issuer of conflicts. I changed my routine to always leave Evernote on a note I call junk so in case I have the problem again of collisions or dups I won't have any content affected. I have created hundreds of notes on three devices with no problems since using this approach.

Hi Nancy, glad to hear another case of duplicate notes was fixed. Can we get more details about the scenarios the most recent fix has solved? I installed the Evernote app on my macbook, and its UI was helpful in determining which of the 60 notes I should delete. Maybe it will be less susceptible to duplicates and conflicts. Is there a UI coming to resolve conflicts? I am new to Evernote and end up with some of my notes being a set of duplicate notes. Just google "javascript diff" to see many projects for UI tools to help resolve conflicts.

I had this problem of duplicate notes again today. About 60 duplicate notes were created. >>Multiple browser tabs were open with the note being editedNo, only one (1). I got burned with Evernote silently duplicating the entire note inside itself many times.I don't know exactly what causes it, but obviously it is a lot of work to try to compare so I try to be very careful.Others report that Evernote has no ability to edit notes at the same time, and has no ability to merge changes.The least it could do is have a warning that another editing session is occurring. >>Other people were looking at the note the same time you did because it was sharedNo, only me. >>You lost internet connection while editingYes. Comcast and wifi. >>What browser are you using? Google Chrome Version 39.0.2171.71 (64-bit)Macbook OSX 10.9.4