EN possibly overwriting note content with content from another note

[tavor 668]

Twice I've experienced a situation where note content from note A is replicated in note B, and the original contents of note B are gone. First time was with either v6.7 or 6.8 (general release, not beta), and the second time was with v 6.9 (general release version). This was not a result of me copying/pasting from note A to note B. I only noticed that it happened because I sort my notes by most recently updated and while I was working with the most recent notes, I noticed that note B was altered.

In both situations, I was able to recover the original contents of note B from other devices that hadn't yet synced. I reported the first instance, but since the note content was not something I wanted to turn over to EN support, this didn't go anywhere.

I've been using EN daily for the past 4 years, and these two instances (both of which have occurred very recently) are the first time I've seen unintentional data loss. 

Figured I'd raise the issue here and see if anyone else has noticed this. I do run a fair number of macros via hotkeys, so it's possible that it's a result of a macro gone wrong (though I don't see the EN window and note manipulation I'd expect if one of my macros was performing this copy/overwrite).

[cairoli 0]

Same issue here. Since I started using evernote for windows 10, about two weeks ago, I've been noticing this. I use no macros or add-ons.

This is a major bug, in my opinion.

[TK0047 422]

That happened to me numerous times on 6.8 hence I went back to 6.7. 

I think it might have happened to me once or twice before then which was not too horrible. But the frequency in 6.8 was super frustrating. And I know it is not from copy - pasting or anything you do, it just replaces the whole note content with a different note but left the title the intact in my case. And I felt stupid posting it and creating a ticket for it with support as I felt like they would say you probably copy pasted accidentally.

Not sure 6.9 has fixed this issue since I am still on my good ole 6.7 at work. 6.9 at the house is not something I use a lot these days.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

21 minutes ago, TK0047 said:

That happened to me numerous times on 6.8 hence I went back to 6.7. 

I think it might have happened to me once or twice before then which was not too horrible. But the frequency in 6.8 was super frustrating. And I know it is not from copy - pasting or anything you do, it just replaces the whole note content with a different note but left the title the intact in my case. And I felt stupid posting it and creating a ticket for it with support as I felt like they would say you probably copy pasted accidentally.

Not sure 6.9 has fixed this issue since I am still on my good ole 6.7 at work. 6.9 at the house is not something I use a lot these days.

This has happened in the past a few times (I've reported it over the years on this forum and in bug reports). It's not a new issue. It seems to crop up every once in a while. I haven't seen it in this version myself (knock on wood), but it sounds sadly familiar, so I think the engineers would take it seriously.

[tavor 668]

2 hours ago, TK0047 said:

I think it might have happened to me once or twice before then which was not too horrible. But the frequency in 6.8 was super frustrating. And I know it is not from copy - pasting or anything you do, it just replaces the whole note content with a different note but left the title the intact in my case.

The note title was left intact both times I experienced this.

2 hours ago, TK0047 said:

And I felt stupid posting it and creating a ticket for it with support as I felt like they would say you probably copy pasted accidentally.

Not sure 6.9 has fixed this issue since I am still on my good ole 6.7 at work. 6.9 at the house is not something I use a lot these days.

That's part of why I started this thread - I figured some people experiencing this wouldn't say anything for any number of reasons. 

6.9 has not fixed it, as I experienced this on 6.9.

 

[TK0047 422]

1 hour ago, tavor said:

6.9 has not fixed it, as I experienced this on 6.9.

I was hoping 6.9 fixed all this. Nonetheless, I am still waiting for the new PDF viewer to be optional before I can go back to updating regularly. Until then, 6.7 it is for me for a while.

[eafpres 111]

On 2/24/2018 at 7:21 PM, tavor said:

Twice I've experienced a situation where note content from note A is replicated in note B, and the original contents of note B are gone. First time was with either v6.7 or 6.8 (general release, not beta), and the second time was with v 6.9 (general release version). This was not a result of me copying/pasting from note A to note B. I only noticed that it happened because I sort my notes by most recently updated and while I was working with the most recent notes, I noticed that note B was altered.

In both situations, I was able to recover the original contents of note B from other devices that hadn't yet synced. I reported the first instance, but since the note content was not something I wanted to turn over to EN support, this didn't go anywhere.

I've been using EN daily for the past 4 years, and these two instances (both of which have occurred very recently) are the first time I've seen unintentional data loss. 

Figured I'd raise the issue here and see if anyone else has noticed this. I do run a fair number of macros via hotkeys, so it's possible that it's a result of a macro gone wrong (though I don't see the EN window and note manipulation I'd expect if one of my macros was performing this copy/overwrite).

I reported this in August 2017.  I thought it was fixed.  Here is what I found was causing it then:

The situation is that something in the iOS app on my iPhone/iPad replaces the note content with contents of another note.  These are then synced so when I look in Windows or web the note is corrupted.  The work around is to view history--it appears every case so far the original note is in history, so I can get them back that way.

[Ruud H 0]

Just happened to me too, after evernote got stuck for like one minute where nothing worked anymore. And unluckily all my devices were synced so I lost one month of collecting information about very important stuff. How can I retrieve it? The history function works only for paid members. If I buy it, does it start with backup up from there, or is past data also available?

 

[DTLow 5,736]

2 hours ago, Ruud H said:

The history function works only for paid members. If I buy it, does it start with backup up from there, or is past data also available?

The Note History backup function is running constantly for all accounts; past data is available

Access to the Note History data is a paid feature; you can subscribe for a single month

[Ruud H 0]

Thanx for the information DTLow,

Cheers,

Ruud

[eafpres 111]

6 hours ago, Ruud H said:

How can I retrieve it? The history function works only for paid members. 

Make sure to check the web version; sometimes that is fine while the clients are not.

[Morgan Chang 2]

It happened to me recently with 6.9 general release.

In my cases,  it seems relative to "Duplicate Note". After duplicating a copy of note A to note B and editing B, somehow the content of A is replaced with that in B !

 

[Ruud H 0]

@eafpres: I checked, but everything was already synchronized, also on my phone.

I first tried the one month free business subscription, hoping I would get the feature to restore history. However with this option, a new business account is created, so it doesn't work on the private account. 

I contacted the support after that and they gave me few days of the premium account so I could restore the note. It is now fixed. From now on I will make a backup regularly and will probably buy the premium version. My notes are to important to me not to have a immediate backup :-).

[tavor 668]

On 3/5/2018 at 5:51 PM, eafpres said:

Make sure to check the web version; sometimes that is fine while the clients are not.

I'm confused. If the various clients have the changes (i.e., they've synced), that means the EN server has the changes. So how could the web version not have the changes?

[CalS 5,280]

14 hours ago, tavor said:

I'm confused. If the various clients have the changes (i.e., they've synced), that means the EN server has the changes. So how could the web version not have the changes?

The web version is gospel.  In the last few releases there have been some display issues with clients, if I remember the posts correctly.  Content is there, just not showing.  Scarier, there have also been reports of actual lost content.  Hard to determine how much of that is cockpit error versus system malfunction, but you get enough reports...

[eafpres 111]

Right. My point was that most cases were client issues the content was displayed wrong in the local client. Unfortunately not always. 

[tavor 668]

6 hours ago, eafpres said:

Right. My point was that most cases were client issues the content was displayed wrong in the local client. Unfortunately not always. 

Got it. This was a different situation; as described in the OP, content from one note overwrote content from another note. It wasn't a display issue. I duplicated the original/unmodified note on an ipad that hadn't yet synced. As soon as it synced, the original note on the ipad was modified, but since I had the duplicate, I used that for recovery.

Separately, I've experienced the display issue, where a note appears empty (apart from note title and url field) in the Windows app, but I can see the note in Android and iOS apps.

[jefito 5,589]

14 hours ago, CalS said:

The web version is gospel.  In the last few releases there have been some display issues with clients, if I remember the posts correctly.  Content is there, just not showing.  Scarier, there have also been reports of actual lost content.  Hard to determine how much of that is cockpit error versus system malfunction, but you get enough reports...

The web version *should be* gospel. Lately, I've been having my doubts about the web app, though.

[CalS 5,280]

10 minutes ago, jefito said:

The web version *should be* gospel. Lately, I've been having my doubts about the web app, though.

Ouch.  I don’t spend that much time there, but when I have it has been accurate.  What’s giving you pause?

[CalS 5,280]

9 hours ago, tavor said:

Separately, I've experienced the display issue, where a note appears empty (apart from note title and url field) in the Windows app, but I can see the note in Android and iOS apps.

Yeah, I bumped into this one again today.  Once a month I take a screen clip of a portion of a specific web page.  9 of the 27 don't display on my PC but do on the web.  Funny thing on the web, I had to refresh after every scroll.  WTF!

[jefito 5,589]

5 hours ago, CalS said:

Ouch.  I don’t spend that much time there, but when I have it has been accurate.  What’s giving you pause?

I don't spend much time there either, I logged in the other day, and got no display at all; just a blank screen. Today it's working (and I flipped back and forth between the old version and the new one). But the reports of lost or duplicated notes have been piling up. That plus the fact that there's been no discernible feature additions in some time. I see semi regular updates on Windows and Android, but not so much on the web client. Makes me wonder what's going on there...

[eafpres 111]

2 hours ago, jefito said:

 see semi regular updates on Windows and Android, but not so much on the web client. Makes me wonder what's going on there...

Good observations.  Around the last major CEO change in 2015 the talk of IPO had gone quiet.  Here's a couple of negative articles from that time.  I can't find any definitive IPO plans since then.  My guess is they are shopping for a buyer.  Our luck it will be Microsoft.

http://www.businessinsider.com/evernote-the-first-dead-unicorn-2015-9

https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/29/9420031/evernote-layoffs-office-closures

By the way, a couple-ish years ago they launched a Windows platform that took away almost all features.  The uproar caused them to roll it back.  Since then lots of tweaks but unclear on Windows direction.  The web version seems pretty stable as a bare bones platform that facilitates cross-device/cross OS use, that's about it.  I rarely use it as it is so under-functioned compared to the Windows client.

And, since I'm grousing, I'm still waiting for the dreaded "Not Responding" to get fixed--promised for years.  My guess is I'll get a new computer with pure SSD and "fix" the problem before EN does, but I can still hope.

[rezecib 98]

@jefito

There is a completely redone web client coming. It's already rolled out for Evernote Business, and should be following for personal users just like Spaces. It's much more fully-featured than the current web client, with UI that very closely matches the Mac client.

There doesn't seem to be any announcement of it, but I asked specifically if I could acknowledge its existence.

[eafpres 111]

2 hours ago, rezecib said:

@jefito

There is a completely redone web client coming. It's already rolled out for Evernote Business, and should be following for personal users just like Spaces. It's much more fully-featured than the current web client, with UI that very closely matches the Mac client.

There doesn't seem to be any announcement of it, but I asked specifically if I could acknowledge its existence.

Hey, that is cool news. Totally turned my frown upside down!  Thank you for the info. 

[jefito 5,589]

9 hours ago, rezecib said:

@jefito

There is a completely redone web client coming. It's already rolled out for Evernote Business, and should be following for personal users just like Spaces. It's much more fully-featured than the current web client, with UI that very closely matches the Mac client.

There doesn't seem to be any announcement of it, but I asked specifically if I could acknowledge its existence.

@rezecib Thanks for the update on that. Not being an Evernote Business user, I wasn't aware of the new client, and the web client forums here have seemed very silent on updates, bug fixes etc. I appreciate the feedback.

[lhb 65]

Evernote, give us some note integrity check already... I had many such issues over the year. It's frightening that you have no possibility to see problems other than when they're obvious, and when you remembering that the note is supposed to be different.

 

[Bloulou 3]

I posted a topic on the same issue two months ago:

I got in contact with support on twitter, they upgraded me to premium for a week so that I could retrieve my notes. It happened a second time one week later, and the same solution was used.
On the 21st of February I was contacted by support to send them a log, which I did but I haven't heard from them since.

I hope this helps.

[tavor 668]

19 hours ago, Bloulou said:

I posted a topic on the same issue two months ago:

I got in contact with support on twitter, they upgraded me to premium for a week so that I could retrieve my notes. It happened a second time one week later, and the same solution was used.
On the 21st of February I was contacted by support to send them a log, which I did but I haven't heard from them since.

I hope this helps.

Thanks. Your experience sounds very much like mine. Hopefully EN can get to the bottom of this. Data loss, or the fear of data loss (since EN does have History feature), and the hassle involved in retrieving data (including having to request access to History for Basic or Plus users), is a huge issue that ranks above new features and fixing minor bugs. What's the point of having an external brain if said brain has dementia?

 

[alanh999 2]

Just had this problem happen to me on 6921, win 10.   A note I have that keeps track of versions of software I develop has been completely overwritten by another note!  Who knows if anything else is gone, I have hundreds of notes.  A big confidence kicker!  I wasn't sorting or anything.  I'm on plus and I don't see how I should have to pay to get a month of premium on the off chance I may get the note back! Not sure if I can trust EN now, even if I take my own backups, I don't know if other important notes have been overwritten. This needs to be fixed asap

[Bloulou 3]

On 3/26/2018 at 6:49 AM, alanh999 said:

Just had this problem happen to me on 6921, win 10.   A note I have that keeps track of versions of software I develop has been completely overwritten by another note!  Who knows if anything else is gone, I have hundreds of notes.  A big confidence kicker!  I wasn't sorting or anything.  I'm on plus and I don't see how I should have to pay to get a month of premium on the off chance I may get the note back! Not sure if I can trust EN now, even if I take my own backups, I don't know if other important notes have been overwritten. This needs to be fixed asap

You should contact the support through twitter, they will up you to premium for a week. Then you can get your note back plus you can check the history of every single note to see if they have been overwritten.

However that's a really annoying fix, and I hope Evernote will fix this quickly.