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AndyDent

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Everything posted by AndyDent

  1. It is pathetically broken. Evernote 10 is no longer a solution for people who want travelling notes without continuous connection. I let my entire 55K+ collection re-download again thinking that may fix things. It took days, more than I had roughly calculated, to get back to a similar size of data. So I know Evernote has downloaded around 43GB of notes. But none of my notes are available offline!!! I tried two ways: Evernote not running, take laptop offline, launch Evernote Evernote running, given time to ensure latest changes from other desktop sync, then kill the wifi
  2. No, it didn't seem to help at all. Keeping Evernote in the foreground seems to run a bit faster. The Evernote folder is now up to 11.28GB with 111,171 items. Only about 4 days more of sync to go. I have 175 notebooks so not really looking forward to trying to use export to force a download but it's worth trying for the key ones, prior to my next trip. Thanks @Boot17 for the suggestion. Wearing my battered aged-developer hat, just to bust people's preconceptions, it would be completely, frustratingly possible for there to be a bug which manifests simultaneously as: Can export an entire notebook (whilst online), yet When offline, many notes show as unavailable offline. Without getting more than 2 finger's worth of single malt creative, I can think of multiple ways such a bug could be occuring and they mostly would be such pains to fix that they will be pushed too far down the priority stack to ever get seen.
  3. Are you referring to something about the sync status of Evernote data or about the Chrome-based settings sync in the developer tools? I can't find anything. I'd appreciate a hint. From a fairly brief look, the developer tools accessible now in Evernote are near-identical to those you get hitting F12 in Chrome desktop edition. They are not obviously changed in any way to reflect anything about the application logic outside of the embedded Chrome engine. Evernote is now an Electron app, basically a giant wrapper around a website with some local capabilities. (Electron is very controversial - it makes it vastly easier to roll out near-identical products across platforms, at a cost in performance and arguably robustness. A 3yo thread here.) Sync status should provide an indication of sync progress. V10 sync is only "quasi instantaneous" when there's a trivial update to map across. When you have been offline for a long time, or are setting up a new device, there may be a lot of data to sync - possibly many days worth based on my calculations. Evernote has both metadata about notes - the bare minimum you may see in a list view, and the content of notes. With 54,556 notes the metadata alone is significant. As Evernote (v10) stores Content as multiple files, there are hundreds of thousands of files to transfer, not a batch download. So far with only 4.6GB (about 11%) of my data downloaded, it's up to around 44,000 files. People who want to learn more about the issues in local-first data and sync are recommended to listen to the MetaMuse podcast episodes 41 and 78. It's a bit technical at times but the entire series is enjoyable - the only podcast non-tech wife's listened to willingly as we drive around. I'm a developer with 40+ years experience including database engines and remote data sync so a bit more informed than average users and with my opinions as to what's useful set accordingly.
  4. Given the impossibility of diagnosing what data may be corrupt, I decided to nuke my Evernote install and download the lot again. Watching the folder size grow, it seems that sync will populate at approximately 1GB/3 hours so it will take around five more days to download all my notes. I really hope that they are actually accessibly stored locally after that and I don't then find the warning that they are not available until I'm online. Watching the folders grow, it seems some binary storage format is used for the contents of notes. So there's little to explain why so many of them previously were classified as unavailable until online, unless it's a metadata corruption in a sync state database. Sync is obviously throttled through some API that's treating the populate from scratch scenario identically with normal sync with the need to coordinate. Hmmmm - I'm gonna run an experiment today of quitting all my Evernote clients (2 other Macs and my iPhone) and see if that changes anything. Will feel really stupid if that helps dramatically!
  5. How do you ensure your notes are synced up to date? There is no sync status in v10
  6. Confirming a majority of my notes are not available offline on my M1 Mac. The evernote directory is over 40GB so the size suggests the notes should be there. The Mac with the problem sits with Evernote open almost all the time, is on wifi as well as wired internet connection all the time at home. Utterly no excuse for this and I'm really worried about my next long trip.
  7. Yep, finally. I'd be utterly in love with what Evernote have done if only they hadn't taken away such valuable features from my Mac experience. I've spent years working for vendors and using better sync tech than Evernote were displaying with their embarrassing whole-note collisions. Its great to see the changes but I'm unfortunately stuck using Legacy unless they decide to support multiple results. I just spent nearly an hour recovering some old notes - one of the nice things about the Legacy local format on Mac is that it's extremely Time Machine-friendly, so you can pull back a few notes, as I'd managed to get one Mac Evernote to utterly stall and warn about several notes I edited today. Your comment on RTE has made me aware of one possible pattern that seems to be more vulnerable - if I have a given note currently selected on a V10 client and edit it on a Legacy Mac, it seems more likely to report sync errors. It would be a plausible optimisation to effectively open a chat session whenever a V10 client has a note selected, which probably puts the server into a special state for that note. (Ironically, I'm right in the middle of crafting a complex sync/sharing sample and article for apps using Realm and MongoDB, so my head is full of such strategies.)
  8. Are you a developer with experience in complex data sync? The sheer weight of metadata alone with 50K+ notes has caused problems in the past especially with mobile clients. I'll admit I'm not a web developer but the way they presenting a fluid scrolling experienc means there's a lot of work going on for lists that big. I've got to break for dinner but decided to fire up the web experience - it's still spinning after a few minutes.
  9. Read my comments above - I'm comparing to Mac Legacy which is vastly superior in multi-window support.
  10. I will believe it is safe when I've had tech support tell me so and confirmed it with my own testing. If by new sync you mean using the new browser experience then pretty sure I had inconsistencies within that. Remember I have over 50K notes so things which are safe at with fewer notes may degrade much faster at my scale.
  11. Oh it's even more of a gulf by comparison. The legacy Mac version allows: multiple tabs within a single-note window, as well as multiple tabs within a "browser window" open-in-tab right-click on an Evernote link, so working from a table of contents lets you quickly see related content - seems the v10 still lacks a back button when you follow a link inside a single note window multiple browser windows (which is where I see the search results) so I can tile them on one of my spare monitors and glance across
  12. That multi-tab approach was what Evernote tech support told me not to use and I confirmed gave inconsistent results. Maybe using FireFox will prevent problems - I was using Chrome (Mac).
  13. I'm a very heavy user of Evernote. In (paid) 12 years I've accumulated over 50K notes. My work setup is 5 screens being 3 Macs many of which have multiple Evernote windows open so I can refer to notes. I appreciate how sync has improved - I'm working in near-realtime across those Macs. In particular, I still run Legacy Mac version on two of those because I need to have multiple searches visible. I will often have 1 or 2 search results open long-term and do a quick search for another word. I realise Legacy has been steadily improving - is there any comparable feature on Legacy that I have missed? Even after a couple (?) of years it still seems the common codebase of New Evernote Desktop (v10) ignores the power of multiple search results. This is a huge missing feature for any serious writer or thought processor using Evernote. I tried using the web version as a replacement and was warned by tech support that trying to keep multiple browser sessions open with different searches was likely to cause corruption. My only other fallback is to run multiple different browser clients - Safari, Chrome, Firefox on one Mac and use those for my searches. Sidenote - I too am very unimpressed with the dark pattern Evernote have adopted describing the v10 migration as an "update" to Legacy. I had to restore 50GB from TimeMachine thanks to you doing that and I didn't notice the little version number. See this thread.
  14. You can still type notebook:project apple as one search expression.
  15. Slack's Electron app had a very checkered history and they deal with rendering that's orders of magnitude easier than Evernote. I can understand the desire to move to a common codebase but it comes with a lot of danger we're seeing here. IMHO every executive at Evernote should be forced to use the app with it preloaded with an extra 50K of mixed, substantial notes. They should be ahead of the performance issues, not playing catchup.
  16. They don't (normally) pull the selection directly into your message at the current location. They require you to - go to the Finder - Show Desktop - Find the screenshot file - make the current note visible as a drag target - drag the screenshot file into that location Ahh, but you may say you can set the Save location for your screenshots to go to Clipboard True, but that then means, as I'm busy writing and want to quickly grab an illustration in my current note, I have to stop and think can I throw away whatever is in the clipboard It's all about breaking the flow with Evernote Annoyances.
  17. Similarly infuriated at this loss. I use this feature all the time. Using Grab and copy is a distinct hit on my workflow. Also, the Import Image command has been broken for a long time, on two different Macs I have noticed it apparently freezing Evernote for minutes, eventually saw the alert below.
  18. I'm always willing to admit I've misunderstood, forgotten or missed the arrival of a feature. Is there some way to tell Evernote Mac to store attachments externally? Or are you just talking about pulling content out of Evernote onto another disk, in which case it would not be synchronised or scanned?
  19. I think something else is going on that you're not understanding. Catalina doesn't magically compress data to some extent but it does introduce a new system partition. If you validly used to have 50GB of notes then you should still have them somewhere. I'm a developer and have a pretty good idea of how things like Evernote work including their database. Data doesn't just magically vanish unless you had an index which drastically needed a rebuild.
  20. Well, in my experience, with around 40,000 notes, it can definitely total up to being a problem - nearly 37GB folder size here. If I had to leave it on the internal drive I would be unable to use Evernote desktop on the Macbook I'm taking on holiday, despite having a 1TB external SSD, because it's a relatively low-spec machine. Fortunately, using a symbolic link let me move the Evernote main data folder to the external.
  21. This is related to issues with searching offline. Different results are being reported and I'm wondering if the OCR searching bypasses local indexing, or varies according to account type. There are a couple of interesting articles on how indexing works but are many years old 2011 blog post on indexing 2013 blog post on image recognition
  22. I think I have an explanation for our different results. I'm fairly sure, after reading your and PinkElephant's post, that you are only talking about hits on OCR documents. That's a very interesting point of difference, which may indicate these searches are using the server API rather than local indexes. Do you have any plain text notes which verify these results? What happens if you type in a plain note with invoice in it then do a search on "invoic"? Note that the results I quoted in my message above are from testing I repeated as I wrote the message, on the current desktop clients. I'm definitely not working from old samples or memory. During the last tech support thread I triggered complete re-indexing to see if there was a related problem. This is highly repeatable for me.
  23. Just to clarify things, for anyone reading that comment, I am not talking about OCR. Evernote search is fundamentally broken as I described at length for original content typed into notes and text clipped from the web. I agree OCR is not perfect and sometimes I've seen slightly off interpretation of words on photos. This is not the same thing.
  24. Where is use of hyphens advertised/described? It doesn't work for me. Are you talking about a really specific example where this worked or am I missing something? The documentation I linked to is the standard Evernote search help page which clearly states using quotes to limit a search. It is the top hit when you Google Evernote Search. At the bottom of that page is a link to the Search Grammar page. I erupted with frustration a while back because the standard helpdesk response is to direct people to that page even though it is only correct for the web client. Neither of those pages states that there is any difference with desktop or mobile client search. In one of my more recent support ticket responses I got the impression I should have been cognisant of the wording on the Search Grammar page that it says Cloud API. Users do not care if you are documenting an API. If an API describes behaviour that is not applicable to end user apps, it should be very difficult for them to find and have a clear disclaimer at the top. (more lines of rant elided...) Back to the search problem Here's the test I used in reporting the problem - search for china "chan" That's a good test because if the quotes are working it should ignore common words such as changes and changed. On the web, I get 27 notes (out of my 40K), indicating that the web client uses the API directly and thus works as documented. On Mac and Windows desktop, iOS mobile clients: 43 notes found, with the highlighting indicating it is indeed doing a partial match on chan in changes. Interestingly, my Android client found the correct 27 notes but I wonder if that was because I seldom use it and it did the search whilst it was part-way through a major metadata sync, so would have had to call the API for the search. Note, my frustration is not because I have to skim 27 vs 43 notes but because in some cases I'm visually scanning hundreds of false positives, having to read through their content. That's a massive waste of time. So my workflow is often: search in Mac client realise there are massive numbers of hits swear open the web client repeat search, noting drastically smaller list stay in web until I've finished my task My workflow if I'm away and trying to use mobile clients involves a lot more swearing if need to search on small terms. Why am I so obsessed by, and upset with this? It's really broken - there is no replacement for being able to restrict searches other than having to use a web client, which is not always an option. A major product point is that Evernote should work offline. It's neither well-known within Evernote support nor is it documented, because the wrong help advice is given. I had to push and push to get someone to talk to developers to realise I was right and the docs didn't reflect reality. As a developer for over 35 years, who's worked on multiple database engines, query interfaces and data visualisation products, I'm professionally embarrassed on behalf of Evernote. This is shoddy, indefensible work.
  25. Something that drives me utterly crazy is that Evernote desktop (both Mac and Windows) has a stupid search - putting things in quotes does not force an exact match. This is contrary to the way the API and the web interface work. It is contrary to the way the documentation says it works, but there is no desktop-specific documentation explaining this difference. This may not be much of an issue for trivial users. I have nearly 40K notes and frequently want to search on exact matches. I have at times given up and used the web UI because desktop returns too many hits. There seems to be some very serious quality engineering going on in Evernote - I'm very impressed by the speed improvements recently in v7. So, please give us a way to search like you have documented, with exact matching. My most recent attempt to clarify this was ticket #2765560 back in Feb 2019 at the end of which I received a clear message. I've just heard back from our developers on the "Search Grammar" issue. From my understanding this appears to be an issue due to confusion between searching from the API vs. searching from the Evernote client. According to our product engineers, the behavior described below is exactly how our API and client always worked. When searching for the word foo through the API (that's important!), you will only find full words. foo will be matched, foobar won't. That aligns with what we have in the API documentation. When searching for the word foo through any Evernote client(including Mac), the actual submitted search query that will hit our API will be foo* — this way you will find both foo and foobar. According to our engineers, this behavior was always like that in all official Evernote clients. Note that, earlier in the discussions, we had again gone around the circle where I'd said search didn't work as documented, people referred me to the search grammar pages (standard helpdesk response) and I had to prove that it didn't work. It would be funny if it wasn't so painful.
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