Hundreds of notes missing content after time machine restoration - Please help

[Mary R 2]

Good morning,

 

I restored a computer completely from a time machine backup that is about 3 weeks old. After the restoration, HUNDREDS of my local notes are without content. They include notes that have attachments, notes that are text only, new, old, recently updated, not recently updated. There is no rhyme or reason to which notes are blank and which aren't.

 

They appear in the notes lists along with all of the other notes, and they still have titles (some have thumbnails of a generic pdf, if there was a pdf, but not all that had a pdf do) but when I click to view them or when I open them, they are utterly blank. They don't have the usual "click here to edit"; it's as though that entire section had been cut out. It can't be edited, and it can't be viewed. I've left it run for days, I've tried everything you could imagine (moving the notes, deleting all of the other notes (offline, of course) to see if they would eventually index (and then re-restored the time machine backup again after that), I've searched the library/.../ accounts/... folder that usually contains the attachments have have had no luck. I am terrified that I will not be able to recover these notes. Some of them are extremely important to me.

 

So far I've lost hours trying anything I could imagine and searching forums, but I would be fine losing another dozen hours if it means getting my notes back. I've searched for the missing pdfs using the finder's search in the library in the hopes that would point me to the location of the other missing notes, but nothing. It's like they never existed... except they clearly did, as their titles are still there. 

 

I could use any help those of you with experience with this could provide to try to recover these notes.

 

Thank you for any help you can provide,

Mary

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Mary, this is obviously a complicated, technical issue.  I recommend you contact Evernote Support directly for help.

You will need to be a Premium account owner to do this.  If you are not Premium, you might consider a 1 month upgrade for $5 just to get support.  With Premium, you also have access to EN Support Chat, the fastest way to make contact.

 

See  Submit an EN Support Ticket 

 

See Evernote Chat Support., available business days 7am-7pm US CST. 

(Chat option appears AFTER you click “Continue” on initial “Evernote Support” page.)

[Mary R 2]

Thanks for the quick reply. Yes, I'm a premium user, but have had very little success with support in the past few years for any problems I've had. (When I have gone through the laborious process of stripping my logs of personal data, it's often resulted in either a dead end or support just no longer responding once it gets past what I figure are the typical problems.) I'm hoping that if I rely on the highly-informed users who have pulled themselves out of these kinds of messes, I'll have a better chance of recovering my lost notes.

[Mary R 2]

New (related) question: Has anyone seen local notes that are locked (with the little padlock symbol in the top right corner) and that say "Note Syncing. You can edit this note as soon as it's done syncing." Given that they are local notes, syncing doesn't apply to them. (This is happening, also, to the notes that aren't in local folders for which the content is missing, but I suspect that if I figure it out for the local notes, I'll be able to figure it out for the others as well.)

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Thanks for the quick reply. Yes, I'm a premium user, but have had very little success with support in the past few years for any problems I've had. (When I have gone through the laborious process of stripping my logs of personal data, it's often resulted in either a dead end or support just no longer responding once it gets past what I figure are the typical problems.) I'm hoping that if I rely on the highly-informed users who have pulled themselves out of these kinds of messes, I'll have a better chance of recovering my lost notes.

 

My recent experiences with EN Support have been quite good.

 

You issue is very technical, and without detailed access to your Mac and/or EN Logs, it is very hard for anyone to properly diagnose.  You might try working the problem in parallel -- submit an EN Support Ticket (and Chat), and see if any of us users here have the skill and time to really help you.

 

Once you submit an EN Ticket, post the ticket# here and perhaps one of the EN employees who monitor these forums will pick it up and try to escalate it for you.  You can also post the Ticket# on Twitter and ask for more help.

 

Since Evernote now is providing official support to all users via Twitter, you might post your request on Twitter @evernotehelps.  It might also be good to include a link back to your post here.

[Mary R 2]

Okay, ticket submitted. To be fair (to support), I'm relying on my experiences with support from a number of years ago and haven't really followed through on recent support requests because of that.

 

I'm going to do a (fourth) restoration of my macbook, since I've been trying a number of things in the hopes of getting it working. That way, it'll be in the condition it was in when it first happened when support gets back to me. And I'll keep evernote offline, so I don't risk my online notes getting corrupted by bad offline versions.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Sounds good.

 

If at any point you fully recover your Local Notebooks, I highly recommend exporting them to ENEX files (one per NB) as a backup that is easily restored.

 

Please post the ticket# from the EN auto-response email here.

[Mary R 2]

Thanks JMichael. I will do that if I get the broken local notes back. Though, I'm losing hope that I'll ever recover them. I'm pretty disappointed, as there were hundreds and hundreds of them. (And they were important notes that I don't have elsewhere.)

 

I'm so disappointed that the software could leave my notes so vulnerable, despite having a full backup of my machine. I just don't understand why the Time Machine backup wouldn't be enough. Shouldn't all of the information be preserved using a Time Machine backup? Including all of the content/attachments/etc. in the local notes? (Everything else handled this seamlessly.)

 

When restoring a backup, why is it that some of the (non-local) notes needed to be synced and redownloaded from the servers? Wouldn't that all have been on the local machine, which was fully backed up? Obviously notes that had never been downloaded, etc. etc., would need to be downloaded after a restoration, but anything that had once been synced, all of these notes and their content were located on my hard drive, accessible offline. Shouldn't that exact state be replicated in Time Machine and restored in that same state? (And if the fix for the non-local notes is that they need to be redownloaded, what do we do about the local notes? Does the software think, wrongly, that they need to be redownloaded, despite being local and so not synced to the servers to begin with?)

 

If I could have a conversation with someone about how this is actually working, I might be able to work out a way to restore these notes.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

 

If I could have a conversation with someone about how this is actually working, I might be able to work out a way to restore these notes.

 

Try the EN Support Chat (requires a Premium account).

 

See Evernote Chat Support., available business days 7am-7pm US CST. 

(Chat option appears AFTER you click “Continue” on initial “Evernote Support” page.)

[Mary R 2]

The support person with whom I was speaking said he was passing it on to the developers. That was 4-5 days ago. Haven't heard anything since. I think I was right to try the forums instead of support.

 

If anyone reads this far down I could really use some help from the community in working this out.

 

To recap:

Restored my entire Mac computer (incl. my Evernote database) from Time Machine.

Roughly half of my notes were devoid of any content after the restoration. The titles were there, but there was no content window for the note, and they appeared as "locked" (with a little padlock in the upper right of the note).

This happened to online and offline notebooks, and to notes with every kind of content (text only, images, PDFs, word documents, etc., etc.).

The online notebooks ended up fine after a sync, as their content got downloaded (or were synced to working versions; I'm not sure)

The local notes remained empty, and now I'm missing several hundred notes. (Over a thousand, actually.)

 

PLEASE HELP!