#12 120 notes lost in NN after bad sync to EN.

[John Buczek]

USING: Ubuntu 13.04 with Cinnamon (Unity completely removed)
NixNote 1.6; EvernoteWeb; EvernoteDroid (always latest updates)

I have 20+ years of notes (thousands) I'm copying from my note handling program n-1 (TreepadBZ under Wine) into the NeverNote/Evernote environment. I find EN much less useful given the way I've been organizing my thoughts for a very long time but I can't resist being able to access my "peripheral brain" from my tablet or android phone as well as my desktop.

I experimented earlier with Everpad and could never get 3-way sync-ing to work properly. Using NN, experiments with a couple dozen notes looked like it was working fine so I started moving bulk data going slowly and carefully. Went fine for a while.

As best as I remember this is what happened.

I was at about 700 notes converted and no apparent problems so I copied 100 more from TreePad. AutoSync is off on all devices - manual sync when and if. After checking that everything looked good I did a manual sync to EN-Web ONLY and got errors. The sync log reported 88 "dirty notes" and many errors. Checking ENWeb showed less than about half the new notes and/or edits had transferred. Examining the problem records I could identify on the NN side I discovered that apparently NN/EN gets into a confused/error state if any combination of stack/notebook/note have exactly the same title. (THIS SHOULD BE ERROR TRAPPED IMHO.) I fixed that. Remembering that NN/EN handles "deleted" records in a non-intuitive manner I forced deletes until no more showed on either side and tried the sync again. This reduced "dirty notes" to about 20 and reduced errors in the sync log. Still some dropout on the web side.

Thinking the problem might be on the Evernote sides rules/policies I reviewed their docs again. TreePad is an infinite level tree which I took full advantage of and tried to maintain while moving the data resulting in lots of stacks and notebooks. I "noted" that Evernote strongly recommends a minimum of stacks and notebooks instead using tagging to impose order. I worked over the 800 notes reducing the structure from about 25 stacks, 75 notebooks and 800 notes to 6 stacks, ~20 notebooks, 500 notes and lots of tags. I then discovered that in the "all notebooks" view there were 6 notes titled "untitled note" and three others that I knew I had deleted and seemed to either be associated with no notebook OR the "orphan" was shown to be in a particular notebook in the "all notebooks" view but wasn't there in the individual notebook view. I located and removed four of the "untitled notes". The other two "untitled" and the two "orphan" notes were locked. I could not change title, add data, delete or anything else.

Thinking I knew what I was doing, REINDEX DATABASE seemed like a good idea after so many edits and doing it generated no obvious errors.

I then tried another sync. About 25% of my notes (120) disappeared on the NN side. On the ENWeb side the count looked good but some of the recent edits (re-organization) did not happen. That's where I am now. I've maintained the original TreepadBZ records so I've not lost any data in the absolute sense but I've lost a couple days work and I'm not sure where to go from here.

I backed up and saved the NN side. Doesn't seem to be any way to backup the web or android sides.

My first impulse is to wipe all the data on the NN side. Then starting with a new, empty database, force a one way sync from ENWeb. If it worked it would appear to require the least duplicated work. Problem is I can't find any instructions for forcing a "one way sync" either way. Based on what happened when I connected ENDroid devices, it seems likely it would happen the way I want. All my problems, whatever they are, if they are indeed on the NN side and will not have migrated across the sync.

If I'm going to do that, I wonder if I should install NN 2 Beta instead and one-way sync to that. The doc's say that NN1 and NN2 use different home folders and CAN be used side by side so maybe now would be the time to upgrade rather than spending time diagnosing problems in the old and soon to be obsolete version. I'll be changing over soon anyway although being old and conservative I would normally wait for it to come out of beta. Would EN-Web be able to keep the two straight - I've already authorized NIXNOTE access to my EN account - hopefully EN would see NN2 as NIXNOTE2 or such.

Any suggestions how to proceed?

TIA

Possibly relevant:

I have no idea if my non-standard Ubuntu setup could impact the problem. I've planned to "upgrade" to Linux Mint 17 "real soon now" when I have the time. Would it be helpful to get my box into that more "standard" config before going too far into this?

[apb1963]

I'm seeing a somewhat similar problem and was considering a similar solution: deleting everything on NN and letting it copy all from the EN side. Using ubuntu 12.04

There are lots of problems with stacks, and titles, and deletions in nixnote; any of which could have caused the problems I'm seeing. I was getting sync problems. I often see them and usually it's a title problem of some kind - such as it doesn't seem to like certain characters such as apostrophes, but this time was a bit different.

The last thing I did was delete some things out of my trash, but I restored others that I wasn't sure if I had duplicates of or not. I figured if I had dupes I could always delete one and if I didn't I could decide later if I really wanted to delete it, better safe than sorry. Sadly, it didn't work that way. Now I have a new "conflicting changes" notebook and it won't sync. No idea what I'm supposed to do now. I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. I get the following message when trying to move some of the messages in the Conflicting Changes notebook.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Well, this is embarrassing.

Some attachments or images for this note appear to be missing from my database.
In a perfect world this wouldn't happen, but it has.
It is embarasing when a program like me, designed to save all your
precious data, has a problem finding data.

I guess life isn't fair, but I'll survive. Somehow...

In the mean time, I'm not going to let you make changes to this note.
Don't get angry. I'm doing it to prevent you from messing up
this note on the Evernote servers. Sorry.

P.S. You might want to re-synchronize to see if it corrects this problem.
Who knows, you might get lucky
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[apb1963]

I was able to move some of the messages in the Conflicting Changes (CC) notebook to a temporary notebook. The ones I was not able to move were all clipped from the web using the chrome plugin clipper for evernote called ... "Evernote Web Clipper". Long story short, I was able to delete all the CC notes by using the big red X button, and managed to finally sync. I should also note that all of the problem notes were in fact duplicates.

[Randy Baumgarte]

Please try nixnote2 beta 4 to see if you continue to have this issue.