Note contents deleted while copying

[Chatchan 2]

Hi everyone, 

This is my first question on this forum. 

I am an author and I have one note in which I keep my writing ideas - they run into several thousand. Just to take a backup, I regularly copy those ideas and mail themselves to my several emails ids so that they are saved and available multiple places. About an hour ago, today when I tried to copy that note, the evernote app in my Mac (Macbook Air Early 2014 with latest Sierra) stopped responding for some time. When after about 10-15 mins, I returned to evernote, it had started working. But that whole note had got deleted. (I have a Time Machine backup that I had taken two days ago, so, I haven't lost everything, hopefully - just two days data.).

I am 100% sure that I didn't press Cmd-x or any other delete command. Based on the discussion I found here https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/26381-help-need-to-restore-text-deleted-from-a-note/, I found that the only way to recovery is to upgrade to the premium version immediately. 

But I had a few questions:

1. Is there any way to recover it without going premium?

2. What might have caused the whole note to become empty when copying it? Is there an upper limit to how many characters can be put in one note - it probably had some 5000 ideas with each being about 10 words, so 50000 words or so?

3. What is a safe way of copying contents of an evernote note and saving it in other places? Share just gives the link, I would like to share the whole content. 

Thanks in advance.  

 

[DTLow 5,736]

16 hours ago, Chatchan said:

1. Is there any way to recover it without going premium?

I think you're referring to access to the Note History backup
You could run your own backups.  My backup runs nightly; incremental for changed notes
I could run this several times a day to try and match the Evernote backup frequency

2. What might have caused the whole note to become empty when copying it?

No ideas.  There's no max chararacters, but there's a max size limit depending on your account level

I'd recommend not using one long note

16 hours ago, Chatchan said:

3. What is a safe way of copying contents of an evernote note and saving it in other places? Share just gives the link, I would like to share the whole content. 

There's export on the Win/Mac platforms.  Attach a timestamp to the filename
I use html export to a cloud drive.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,938]

17 hours ago, Chatchan said:

1. Is there any way to recover it without going premium?

2. What might have caused the whole note to become empty when copying it? Is there an upper limit to how many characters can be put in one note - it probably had some 5000 ideas with each being about 10 words, so 50000 words or so?

3. What is a safe way of copying contents of an evernote note and saving it in other places? Share just gives the link, I would like to share the whole content. 

 

You can sign up for Premium for just one month and then cancel. That will give you access to the note history without a very large expense.

I don't have much to say about points 2 and 3, but I would echo @DTLow's suggestion not to put all your ideas into one long note. I'm a writer too, and I have separate notebooks for various projects, with notes in each notebook for ideas I have, reading to do, etc. That way if I lose one note (which fortunately I never have), I don't lose everything. And of course smaller notes are less cumbersome to work with. My system is pretty primitive--I don't use tags yet--but I find that Evernote's search function helps me find ideas that I know I have squirreled away in some note somewhere.

[eRobb4 0]

I had this same issue today. I have a long note that's something of an activity log for a video project I've been working on, and when I went to copy a small portion of it the entirety of the note below the text I selected was deleted. I believe this is a bug, but I don't see a way to submit a ticket online without upgrading for support?

[gazumped 11,652]

Hi - all users can contact support via https://twitter.com/evernotehelps

[Chatchan 2]

Thank you very much to everyone for all their helpful comments. 

I upgraded to premium and got the contents back. 

Have started keeping notes short. 

 

 

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,938]

Great to hear that you were able to recover your work! I know that must have been a devastating feeling.  > 

It's still important to realize that this really should not have happened, assuming you didn't accidentally cut rather than copy. Is it possible that the clipboard (or whatever it may be called on Macs) has a size limit (whether programmed in or just practical) that you bumped up against? I have no idea.

[Chatchan 2]

8 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Great to hear that you were able to recover your work! I know that must have been a devastating feeling.  > 

 

Yes, it was a relief - thanks for your concern.

8 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

It's still important to realize that this really should not have happened, assuming you didn't accidentally cut rather than copy. Is it possible that the clipboard (or whatever it may be called on Macs) has a size limit (whether programmed in or just practical) that you bumped up against? I have no idea.

I googled about it, but couldn't find any upper character limit for Mac clipboard.  Here it says that Mac gives a warning note - I got nothing of that sort. 

[Chatchan 2]

On 17/07/2017 at 8:23 PM, DTLow said:

I think you're referring to access to the Note History backup
You could run your own backups.  My backup runs nightly; incremental for changed notes
I could run this several times a day to try and match the Evernote backup frequency

 

Yes, I do run Time Machine backups daily. But how do we identify the note in a a Time Machine backup. It seems Evernote while storing individual notes doesn't use the same name for them as the note title. Even in its own storage location on the computer, a note is not easy to identify. By the way, which other apps can be used an Evernote note?

 

 

[DTLow 5,736]

39 minutes ago, Chatchan said:

But how do we identify the note in a a Time Machine backup.

The TM backup isn’t that useful for this; for my backups I use the export function

As you noted, a separate folder is used for each note.
We can retrieve the folder name from the database (I use a script),
or simply search for known text in the note

>>By the way, which other apps can be used an Evernote note?

Any file can be saved as an attachment to a note.  
PDFs and images are the most common.  Evernote also works well with Office/iWork files

[Chatchan 2]

26 minutes ago, DTLow said:

The TM backup isn’t that useful for this; for my backups I use the export function

As you noted, a separate folder is used for each note.
We can retrieve the folder name from the database (I use a script),
or simply search for known text in the note

 

1

Thanks for the answer and the script. 

 

26 minutes ago, DTLow said:

 

 

>>By the way, which other apps can be used an Evernote note?

Any file can be saved as an attachment to a note.  
PDFs and images are the most common.  Evernote also works well with Office/iWork files

No, I meant how can the backup note file be accessed if there's a bug in evernote because of which the evernote app can't be opened? 

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, Chatchan said:

No, I meant how can the backup note file be accessed if there's a bug in evernote because of which the evernote app can't be opened? 

For my backups, I export (Mac) in html format to an iCloud folder.  
The backup notes can be opened with any web browser on any of my devices

A separate file is created for each note, with the title as the filename 
A .resources folder is created if there are attachments

[Chatchan 2]

Thanks for the reply. Do you take individual backups of each note? Or is there a way to take backup of all notes in one notebook or for all the notes in all notebooks for that matter?

[DTLow 5,736]

2 hours ago, Chatchan said:

Do you take individual backups of each note? Or is there a way to take backup of all notes in one notebook or for all the notes in all notebooks for that matter?

When you use the export function in Evernote, you control the notes being backed up
Select a single note; multiple notes; all notes in a notebook; or all notes in the database

My backup script runs automatically overnight

1. Daily Incremental
   - Changed Notes in HTML format
   - A bulk export, but a separate file is created for every note
    
2. Weekly Entire Database
   - In ENEX format
   - A bulk export for each Notebook, a deperate file is created for each notebook

[Chatchan 2]

Sorry, I have been silent on this thread for so long. It's not that I am not grateful for all the help provided here -  I am. It's that I had to travel to several rural places over the last week and didn't have good net connection. I wanted to read about scripts as I have never used them. Finally, I figured it out (or at least I think so) - I am planning to try it out. Any advice?

[DTLow 5,736]

6 minutes ago, Chatchan said:

I am planning to try it out. Any advice?

This might help as a starter