A bunch of my notes were deleted and are not in the trash on any device
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Hello,
I’m desperate and could really use some help–I lost a bunch of notes that were really important to me. I typically use the web client (https://app.simplenote.com/old) and the iOS app. I just opened up the iOS app and the note I was working on got deleted before my very eyes and is nowhere to be found. It appears as though my notes have reverted to versions from several days ago and all notes since have been deleted. I have checked the trash and they are not there.
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It appears that every new note with a Unix timestamp after 1714520742.301059 was just deleted without a trace. This is the second time this has happened in a matter of a few weeks; after nearly 15 years of of using Simplenote I’m losing faith that I can actually depend on it anymore.
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Hi! Did you try logging in to the Simplenote web app at https://app.simplenote.com/ as soon as the note disappeared?
Please check the notes from there to see if they are all correct and up to date.
If they are, you can safely log out and log back in to the Simplenote app on all your devices. When you log in again, all of the notes that are stored on the Simplenote service will be re-synced.
If you aren’t seeing the correct notes in the web app or another Simplenote app, please let us know and we can continue troubleshooting from there. Please let us know:
- What devices you use Simplenote on
- Their operating systems and versions
- The Simplenote versions on each
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The correct notes are still missing in both the web app and the Simplenote app.
On iOS I use the app version 4.50 on iOS 17.4.1. On web I use https://app.simplenote.com/old/.
The email I use for the account is (email visible only to moderators and staff). I lost notes with several thousand words and a few days of homework; I’d really appreciate being able to get these back!
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Could you try the current web app, without the /old attachment?
Have you recently accessed Simplenote (web or app) using another device, maybe Android, or an older iOS device?
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I have tried both the current web app (as suggested) and /old (just to be sure.) I believe the behavior that caused this was leaving /old open on a Chrome tab for several days and then opening my laptop, which caused the notes to be deleted (though there is no obvious reason why this would occur.)
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To be clearer, this is what happened:
- On Monday I closed my laptop that had https://app.simplenote.com/old/ open.
- I wrote several notes on the iOS app (4.50) in the days since.
- Last night I opened my laptop and made some changes to a different note in /old.
- This morning (Friday 5/3) I woke up and made more changes to the same note, and also made some edits of other notes on iOS. As of this afternoon I could still see all the changes I made on both ends in the past few days as normal.
- Suddenly, at 4PM today (GMT+8) as I had the iOS app open, the note I was working on literally got deleted as I was watching it. There was no warning, I was just returned to the list of notes.
It appears as though all of the changes from Wednesday to Friday were just wiped–I inspected the contents of Simplenote’s IndexedDB database in the browser after downloading it as JSON and found that no notes had modify times beyond 1714520742.301059 as noted above. It seems like everything I’ve done in the interim was just wiped clean.
This is extremely concerning and although I sat down and made a quick backup script for my Simplenote data, I’m really at a loss as to how to prevent this. I really, desperately need these notes back as they contained the contents of several assignments that need to be turned in.
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Hi @calebwlfoust! Can you recall if there was any title change made to the note?
That said, using the old version of the app at app.simplenote.com/old rather than the new one could be part of the problem as the old version is no longer maintained, and the note may have never synced to the server.
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The notes had all synced, as far as I am aware–I was using the iOS version to write the notes I lost, and had stable internet the whole time. For a period of time, all notes were visible in all places, and then several days of them all disappeared at once. It’s possible this relates to using /old, though if using that client means risking data loss, it’s probably not worth keeping around (or at the very least, it it may be better to inform users of that risk.) It is clear that there is a serious bug here, one that may or may not be caused by the use of /old alone.
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My apologies! I missed the question. There was no title change–I either created new notes or added to existing ones, that’s all.
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@calebwlfoust You’ve made a good point about /old. I’ll speak with the team about the benefit/risk of keeping it around. For now, I recommend you take the following steps:
- Sign out of Simplenote on every browser and clear the cache for Simplenote
- Use app.simplenote.com moving forward and not /old
From what you’ve said, it sounds like a sync with the /old browser app happened while you were on the iPhone app, removing the data you had previously added on the iPhone.
If an issue does happen again while you’re only using app.simplenote.com and the iPhone app let us know.
Additionally, if you’d like to give our other journaling app a try, Day One, let me know. I’d be happy to set you up with a gift of Premium on it. It offers more robust back-ups and privacy options than Simplenote, along with many more features you might enjoy: https://dayoneapp.com/features/
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This just happened again, after using only the app.simplenote.com client (not /old) and iOS. Thankfully I caught it happening and, anyway, had a system in place that backs up my Simplenote changes to a Git repository. There is something broken in Simplenote’s synchronization algorithm and it appears it was introduced in the past few months (or my account has too many notes and this is some sort of scale/timing issue.)
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Our developers informed us that sometimes the note somehow ends up in another note’s content. Can you try using the History tool to see if that’s what happened?
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It doesn’t appear to have. I did not investigate it to the same degree as last time, but I seem to have completely lost the note’s history.
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@calebwlfoust To be sure, have you already checked the history of other notes? When searching the note history, please check for content that may have been in the note. We don’t recommend just searching for the title.
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I regularly back up all of my notes to a Git repository and the missing content isn’t present in any of the notes, at least in their current version. It seems like you’re saying that prior versions containing the deleted history may get transferred to other notes, but checking all of my recent notes to see if this occurred sounds time-consuming.
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It seems like you’re saying that prior versions containing the deleted history may get transferred to other notes, but checking all of my recent notes to see if this occurred sounds time-consuming.
This can occur in some instances where there are sync conflicts, so I would recommend checking other notes to make sure that didn’t occur.
Unfortunately, though, if you’ve already checked the trash and other notes and aren’t able to find the content, it’s likely that it is now gone. You mention that it happened when you had the /old web app open for several days in a web browser and woke that computer from sleep. Could you have also had Simplenote open on another device at the time, two instances of the app syncing at the same time can increase the risk of sync conflicts.
We recommend closing Simplenote on one device before opening it on another to help prevent these occurances.
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Thanks for the response! To be clear, since my original post I have ceased using /old and just use the standard web + iOS apps, and yet data loss still seems to be happening with some regularity. In the 15 years (!) I’ve been using Simplenote I don’t recall running into issues like these before, so I’d surmise that it’s a relatively recent regression.
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I have ceased using /old and just use the standard web + iOS apps, and yet data loss still seems to be happening with some regularity.
That is certainly frustrating. What has your routine been with Simplenote? We’d love to try and reproduce this so that we can report to engineering.
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This just happened again a few minutes ago. I lost several days of edits and notes; it’s as though they never happened. I mostly use Simplenote on iOS, but occasionally will use the web client as well.
In this case I was looking at a note on iOS and it reverted to the version from earlier this week right in front of my eyes. This applied to all of the notes in my account; all recent changes just disappeared. This was without any obvious contention between a web client and an iOS client; it had been probably 12 hours since I’d accessed Simplenote on a desktop device. Thankfully I have a backup system now, but something seems seriously broken.
Either there has been a severe, accidental regression in the Simplenote backend service or I have reached a scale (~16,000 notes) that causes regular breakage. I am an engineer and would be happy to communicate with someone on your end if you need more details.
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