The elephant ate my homework.

[alancam 1]

Hello,

 

Despite trying to be a little light-hearted with my flippant title, I'm actually devastated.

 

I have spent almost six hours making a in-depth notes on Evernote Web Beta. But the note content has disappeared.

 

Having received no warning from the interface that anything was wrong, I clicked on the "all notes" button to check another note. I received the "Note saved in [notebook]" message. But all of the note content, from hundreds of bullet points to images, has disappeared. All that remains is the tags, title and notebook association. 

 

Please, please can someone help me recover this? I can't afford the time to redo this. It was the collection information from many textbooks. And I have many more topics to cover for my exams in a week. So literally don't have time to do it again. I've contacted support but they're closed over the weekend.

 

I moved to Premium and the Beta as I had this happen to me on the free account with the normal web interface. Evernote claims to protect against errors with it's history feature, yet all of these are blank.

 

And the nauseating irony is that I was taking notes on dementia.

 

Alan

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

If it never got saved, it isn't likely recoverable. 

 

It is usually a very bad idea to use betas for mission critical or work related tasks. Betas should always be assumed to fail. For mission critical/production/work tasks, you'd be wise to use only stable releases. If you choose to use the beta, you need to accept there is a risk of data loss or corruption. 

[alancam 1]

Dear Scott,

Many thanks for your reply.

You make an important point regarding beta projects, however, this has happened on the"stable" interface in the past, too. Do you think that this is an inherent Evernote issue?

Also, I was notified that the note was saved. Does this mean that it had just been saved somewhere else? Hidden from the less technical eyes of me?

Thanks again for your help.

Kind regards,

Alan

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

In the context of the beta, I wouldn't trust anything. Just because it said it was saved, doesn't mean it actually was. Perhaps it was, but a bug prevented it from sticking and was deleted, or perhaps it was never saved, but displaying the notice that it was saved is the bug. We've only had access to the beta for a couple of days so really it is very difficult to troubleshoot. 

Saved somewhere else? Where else? When you are working in the web interface, you are working directly on Evernote's servers. A note is saved there, or it isn't saved at all. There's nowhere else (unlike if you use a desktop client). You could contact support, but they can't really sift through your database stored on their servers to look for one note you may have lost. Not only do evernote employees not have those privileges (indeed, if they could access users' notes, it would be dismaying!), but that would be a monumental chore. 

 

There seems to be a relatively widespread problem with new notes not getting saved in the beta, based on posts I've seen here, so I'm sure its a bug, and I'm sure it will be fixed. 

 

I'm sorry to hear it has happened in the past with the old version too. I've heard of others having the same problem. Not sure of the cause, whether its a quirk of Evernote, or a glitch in the users' browser, or what. In general, it seems like when using the web interface it is probably ideal to try and enter your initial note information (title, a line or two of body text) then verify that it has been saved by clicking on another note, and returning to the new note. Notes should be saved instantaneously in the web interface. At least this way, if there is a glitch, you've lost a largely empty note that will take no time of you to reproduce. 

 

In the meantime, I'd stay away from the beta web interface when working on mission critical stuff! I'd hate to see you lose more stuff unnecessarily!

[alancam 1]

Dear Scott,

Many thanks again for your reply.

I appreciate your input, I am always impressed by those willing to help their peers through generosity alone.

When I asked us there may be a copy saved elsewhere, this was coming from a position of relative ignorance of technology. Evernote pitches itself quite strongly at someome like me, with its simplicity based branding. Maybe there should be a caveat made visible for less tech savvy users like me before we sign up, get premium and use the various platforms.

Unfortunately, I'm restricted to the web interface as I use Linux.

Maybe adding a manual save button that errors if it's unsuccessful.

Again, thank you for your input, I am grateful for your peer support.

Kind regards,

Alan

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Maybe there should be a caveat made visible for less tech savvy users like me before we sign up, get premium and use the various platforms.

Alan

I'm not clear what this means. What caveat would you want to see? That there is a chance you may lose some data sometime? This caveat would have to exist for EVERY application or service that exists. There is no such thing as 100% uptime, there's no such thing as bug-free software. Does Evernote need to say: "As with all series and products, there may be bugs that could potentially cause data loss without warning.".

 

Should there be a similar caveat on your personal computer?: "Caution: The hard disk drive contained within this computer may fail spontaneously without warning causing instantaneous, permanent data loss". Every single hard drive will fail. This is an unavoidable truth and the loss is complete and permanent when it does inevitably occur. Despite this inevitability, I've not once seen such a warning. 

 

This is computing life. Things sometimes don't work and proper precautions need to be taken, and this is not generally something that requires immense tech savviness. 

 

Now, I'm not excusing Evernote for having bugs in their web interface that lead to data loss. Ideally that shouldn't ever happen (in reality it should happen as infrequently as possible).  Evernote needs to work their butt off to eliminate these things, but there will always be the risk that they will happen despite these efforts. 

 

So, I'm not sure what kind of help such a caveat would be. And I'm not sure what relationship this has to your premium subscription... premium users are no more or less likely to lose data than free users. If you are unsatisfied with Premium, contact support, explain your issue and dissatisfaction, and requisition a refund for your unused premium time. 

 

 

I'm pleased to provide help to fellow users! I'm sorry that I am not able to help you get your data back! 

[alancam 1]

Dear Scott,

Thanks again for your reply.

When I say caveat, I am referring to your point regarding the high risk of data loss for beta and the reduced but still significant risk with the stable web platform.

The beta was offered to me when logged in with no notice of increased risk. I'm not saying that this it's a big problem but there's a dissociation between the engineering side (where developers may always see this as high risk) and marketing (where ease of use and attractiveness are championed to users).

Regarding my premium account, I mean that premium is sold as having better safety for notes - the literature on the history feature made me change. I'm not looking to close my account, it's just worth providing more information.

I don't agree, however, that all IT systems would need such a caveat. I have never lost data with online banking. Any crashes that happen during my use of Office are recoverable as constant copies are made. Evernote has a different implementation which means it can't be as reliable. I hadn't appreciated that from the marketing literature. So this could be more detailed.

I'm otherwise happy with the service, glad I have premium and like the new interface. Some people on this forum have been very silly, using rather rather inflammatory language. I'm not one of those, I just want a good service to keep getting better and become robust, which it has yet to be.

Kind regards,

Alan

[waltercarter 0]

Worked for awhile on a draft post for my blog (otherwise I do this on Onenote).  Suddenly pieces of the draft vanished or were not properly saved.  I like Simplenote, where you can go back and find prior versions of drafts.  Love the new interface, but it will have to prove its way.  It has great potential but we have to know the rules of the game.

[charboyd 272]

Hello,

 

Despite trying to be a little light-hearted with my flippant title, I'm actually devastated.

 

I have spent almost six hours making a in-depth notes on Evernote Web Beta. But the note content has disappeared.

 

Having received no warning from the interface that anything was wrong, I clicked on the "all notes" button to check another note. I received the "Note saved in [notebook]" message. But all of the note content, from hundreds of bullet points to images, has disappeared. All that remains is the tags, title and notebook association. 

 

Please, please can someone help me recover this? I can't afford the time to redo this. It was the collection information from many textbooks. And I have many more topics to cover for my exams in a week. So literally don't have time to do it again. I've contacted support but they're closed over the weekend.

 

I moved to Premium and the Beta as I had this happen to me on the free account with the normal web interface. Evernote claims to protect against errors with it's history feature, yet all of these are blank.

 

And the nauseating irony is that I was taking notes on dementia.

 

Alan

Hi. Would you please create a support ticket and message back your ticket #? I would like to have the Evernote team further investigate this issue. 

[alancam 1]

Dear Charboyd,

 

Many thanks for your reply.

 

I previously submitted a ticket, #753014.

 

I hope this helps. Let me know if I can be of further help.

 

Kind regards,

 

Alan 

[kstedman 1]

I'm commenting here because a similar thing happened to about 4 of my students who are using Evernote. (I wrote a post here, but I haven't heard a comment yet, so I thought I'd dive in.)

 

I've taught with Evernote for about 3 years, and I've always asked students to simply log in through the web interface, and I've never had this problem until this semester. 

 

Let me ask a perhaps silly question: when I log in through the web (clicking "sign in" from evernote.com), is that inherently taking me to a beta version of the web interface? Or is that something that you can opt in and out of? I was under the impression that it was simply another access point--some access through the web, some through their Windows install, some through their Android app, etc. Is that not true--is the web version inherently beta-ish, and thus less stable?

 

If so, I really need to tell my students that ASAP.

[jefito 5,589]

Let me ask a perhaps silly question: when I log in through the web (clicking "sign in" from evernote.com), is that inherently taking me to a beta version of the web interface? Or is that something that you can opt in and out of? I was under the impression that it was simply another access point--some access through the web, some through their Windows install, some through their Android app, etc. Is that not true--is the web version inherently beta-ish, and thus less stable?

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/69003-opting-into-and-out-of-the-new-web-beta/

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

The beta is an opt-in thing.

If you are using the original web interface, that is not a beta. It is not inherently unstable (unless you are a bit cynical).

If your students have accidentally opted into the beta, the instructions for opting out should be in that link posted by jefito.

[kstedman 1]

Thanks for the link--as a precaution, I'll ask them to make sure they're not in beta. That's the most practical "take this step" direction I've been able to find so far!