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Saving modified attachments or files


DeanL

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I have an MS excel document saved in my note.  After I open it from within Evernote and modify the document, and sync Evernote, it is not saving back into Evernote.  The modified document is saved in my files outside of Evernote.   The implication is that I cannot see the latest version of the modifed document when I re-open Evernote.   How do I open, modify and save an attachment so that the modified version is available next time I open Evernote.

 

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This should work in Evernote -- I've been doing it for years now.

 

Make sure that you SAVE and CLOSE the document in Excel BEFORE you sync Evernote.

Do NOT do a SAVE AS.

 

If you're doing all that and it still doesn't work, then you may want to Submit a BUG report via an EN Support Ticket. In the Support Form, select "Report a bug, crash, or data lost", and start the Ticket Title with "BUG:  " to make it clear.  Reporting a bug should be available to all users, including Free Account owners.

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Standard procedure:

* Open the attachment from Evernote (double click on it, or right-click, Open With...)

* Edit the document, and when you're done, save it

* Evernote should pick up the saved document automatically

 

Just tested this in Windows and it worked fine.

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  • 3 weeks later...
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I have multi-saved files in Evernote attachments folder. I mean 1-2-3-4 versions of the same file. I'm not sure that last file's version is opened with note opening

Is it normal? Could you advice smth?

Thanks

The attachments folder in Evernote for WIndows holds temporary copies of attachments while you are editing. Here's how it works:

* You double-click on an attachment, or right-click "Open WIth..." and pick a program

* Evernote retrieves the attachment from your notes database, and writes it out as a file in your attachments folder. This is a temporary copy of your attachment.

* Evernote then triggers the program that's configured (either by the OS, or by your choice) to edit the attachment, and points the program at the temporary copy in the attachments folder

* You edit the attachment, and when you're done, you Save it (not Save As)

* Evernote notices that the temporary copy of the attachment has changed, and pulls it in to your notes database

* At some point, you close the editing program, and theoretically, Evernote can then recognize that the program is done with the temporary copy, and can therefore delete it

 

Occasionally, the hand-off from the editing program to Evernote goes bad, and that's why you can get copies of the attachment laying around littering your attachments folder. Almost all of the time, they are safe to remove, as they are temporary copies of the attachment that's stored in your note database. Evernote doesn't ever open these files again, as far as I know.

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I have multi-saved files in Evernote attachments folder. I mean 1-2-3-4 versions of the same file. I'm not sure that last file's version is opened with note opening

Is it normal? Could you advice smth?

Thanks

 

You don't say which EN client you are using, EN Win or EN Mac?

 

If either client is leaving muliple copies of old versions of an attachment within the Evernote folder, then that is very poor design.

It it totally unacceptable for an app to leave old, temp versions of anything lying around on a permanent basis.  Imagine how quickly this could chew up your local storage???

 

Having said that, I just ran some tests in EN Mac 6.0.6, and I see no evidence of this bad behavior.

When I open an attachment for edit, ONE temp file is opened for the edit.  When I save and quite the app, the temp file is removed.

 

Maybe it is a EN Win bug/design flaw.  I don't know since I have not tested EN Win.

But EN Mac seems to be behaving properly for me.

 

If you are consistently seeing multiple old, temp versions of attachments within your Evernote folder, then I would suggest that you need to Submit a BUG report via an EN Support Ticket. In the Support Form, select "Report a bug", and start the Ticket Title with "BUG:  " to make it clear.  Reporting a bug should be available to all users, including Free Account owners.  Other Ticket types available to Free users are "Data Loss", "Crash", & "Sync Issue".

 

Before I close, I'd like to suggest one thing.  IMO, files that you frequently change are better stored in Dropbox, where there is NOT monthly upload limit, and you can have version control.

You can even provide a link in an Evernote Note to the file in Dropbox if you wish.

 

The EN search of attachments for a Premium user is powerful.  So one approach for frequently updated files is to keep the primary version in DropBox, and then periodically (once a week/month) upload a copy to Evernote.

 

Good luck, and let us know how it goes.

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You would think this is an easy concept to understand and explain, but it's really not to those of us who just expect software to do what we want. Me being one of those people....

Thanks for explaining it so well, Jefito.

 

You're welcome. A development team that I worked on a few years back developed much the same type of system in our GIS program, so I'm familiar with how it works, in general. There's a fair bit that goes on behind the scenes, it depends on cooperation among various programs, including, the editing program, Windows itself, and the originating program. It isn't always perfect, and our experience was that files could get left behind in a similar fashion as is exhibited here, for no good reason that we could discern, or at least fix.

 

I didn't do that work myself, but the guy in the next cube did, and I got to listen to his mutterings and complaints as he worked on it, and also reviewed some of the code.

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  • 2 weeks later...

 

I have multi-saved files in Evernote attachments folder. I mean 1-2-3-4 versions of the same file. I'm not sure that last file's version is opened with note opening

Is it normal? Could you advice smth?

Thanks

The attachments folder in Evernote for WIndows holds temporary copies of attachments while you are editing. Here's how it works:

* You double-click on an attachment, or right-click "Open WIth..." and pick a program

* Evernote retrieves the attachment from your notes database, and writes it out as a file in your attachments folder. This is a temporary copy of your attachment.

* Evernote then triggers the program that's configured (either by the OS, or by your choice) to edit the attachment, and points the program at the temporary copy in the attachments folder

* You edit the attachment, and when you're done, you Save it (not Save As)

* Evernote notices that the temporary copy of the attachment has changed, and pulls it in to your notes database

* At some point, you close the editing program, and theoretically, Evernote can then recognize that the program is done with the temporary copy, and can therefore delete it

 

Occasionally, the hand-off from the editing program to Evernote goes bad, and that's why you can get copies of the attachment laying around littering your attachments folder. Almost all of the time, they are safe to remove, as they are temporary copies of the attachment that's stored in your note database. Evernote doesn't ever open these files again, as far as I know.

 

 

Thanks for answer. I changed Evernote sync option from "hour" to "daily" & most of my problems with multi-copies were gone.

 

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Thanks for answer. I changed Evernote sync option from "hour" to "daily" & most of my problems with multi-copies were gone.

It's not very clear to me that there's an actual connection there, but I'm glad your problem is lessened...

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  • 4 months later...

Scenario One:

I have also been seeing this behavior in my Evernote-Windows environment.     (version 5.8.13.8152)

   1)   I make a change in an Excel attachment.

   2)   I save the file.

   3)   I close the file.

   4)   I re-open the file, and any changes that I made are NOT reflected.  

 

Scenario Two:

  BUT - If  (in addition to the above sequence)  I close the file....   and then also close the EXCEL application, then all is fine.  So maybe there's an issue with temp files sync'ing up.  I do see that after the file name, there is a  [n]  after the name, possibly reflecting the version number of the temp file that's running around.  

 

Yep - In the Attachments directory, I do see that there is a most-recent version present ( [8] in my case, right now), but that file does not reflect the most recent changes.      ....while there is also a second-to-the-most-recent version [7], which ironically DOES reflect the most recent changes.  

 

That first round of strange behavior (Scenario One) is 100% consistent for me, when I have a second Excel file (yes, a completely  different  XLS file!) open through this whole procedure.   If I save the file - close the file - and close Excel - then closing Excel seems to sync all the temp files to where they should be.   I just sure wish I could get the files to sync correctly without needing to close the Excel app.  

 

 - Jim

 

 

 

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  • 6 months later...
On 23/02/2015 at 11:23 PM, jefito said:

The attachments folder in Evernote for WIndows holds temporary copies of attachments while you are editing. Here's how it works:

* You double-click on an attachment, or right-click "Open WIth..." and pick a program

* Evernote retrieves the attachment from your notes database, and writes it out as a file in your attachments folder. This is a temporary copy of your attachment.

* Evernote then triggers the program that's configured (either by the OS, or by your choice) to edit the attachment, and points the program at the temporary copy in the attachments folder

* You edit the attachment, and when you're done, you Save it (not Save As)

* Evernote notices that the temporary copy of the attachment has changed, and pulls it in to your notes database

* At some point, you close the editing program, and theoretically, Evernote can then recognize that the program is done with the temporary copy, and can therefore delete it

 

Occasionally, the hand-off from the editing program to Evernote goes bad, and that's why you can get copies of the attachment laying around littering your attachments folder. Almost all of the time, they are safe to remove, as they are temporary copies of the attachment that's stored in your note database. Evernote doesn't ever open these files again, as far as I know.

That sounds about right. This seems to happen more frequently than I would like. So much so I have a shortcut to Evernote's Attachment folder so I can drag the attachment back into Evernote manually should it occur.

Not knowing when it's dropped the ball though is a bit of a problem. Pretty much have to save, close and immediately reload every attachment just to be sure it's saved.

Not great!

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On 2/12/2016 at 8:06 AM, Stephen23 said:

This seems to happen more frequently than I would like.

Perhaps you should submit a bug report:

I recommend that everyone who experiences a bug to submit a bug report.  This will make sure that Evernote is aware of the issue, provide your environment data to help identify/fix the issue, and put more pressure on Evernote to fix.

 

Submit a BUG report via an EN Support Ticket. In the Support Form, select "Report a bug", and start the Ticket Title with "BUG:  " to make it clear.  Reporting a bug should be available to all users, including Free Account owners.  Other Ticket types available to Free users are "Data Loss", "Crash", & "Sync Issue", "Payment/Billing Issue", and  "Log in issues".

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  • 6 months later...

Using Evernote Premium 6.2.4.3244 (303244) on Windows 7 pro x64 and dealing with an Excel xlsx attachment:

I am dealing with similar things here. The issues and reasoning behind the behavior is well described above. Thanks for everyone's input, it helped!

Evernote seems to update the file saved within the note immediately when I do a save but, I have noticed that sometimes my system fails to close out the "EXCEL.EXE *32" process when I close the Excel application. The files get left behind in the attachments folder when this occurs. If I open the task manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc) and kill the process this triggers Evernote to release the file (Filename.xlsx) and the file is automatically deleted out of the attachments folder (Evernote does keep a backup of many of the files there as a .backup file, these can be deleted if all is well). My system is unpredictable as to when it will close the Excel application but not kill the EXCEL.EXE *32 process. There must be something residual that Excel is still trying to deal with? After I kill the process manually Things function properly again and I temporarily don't get the file duplication with the [1], [2], [3], numbering. Yay! The residual temp files in the attachment folder don't seem to affect the the file saved to the Evernote note, they just make a mess.

 

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