Lost 24 hours of notes
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On Friday last week I noticed that the notes I’d been keeping on my phone weren’t getting synced to the web app. I assumed something might be going on with the servers, and that it’d get synced and merged when the issue was fixed.
The next day when opening the app, the note got reverted to Thursday last week, with no history after that. Both the web app and the phone app report Thursday as being the last edit.
I’ve been using Simplenote since 2015 and have only experienced minor hiccups before (weird newlines or duplicate paragraphs), but this is the first time I lose data. That particular note contained crucial contact information, which is now lost.
I’d like to suggest that the app keeps local backups as well, so that if anything goes wrong when syncing, the user has the choice of force pushing a local backup instead. You could highlight local and server backups differently in the timeline slider, and give the user agency in how to resolve conflicts. It’s surprising to me that my phone did have the newest version locally, and then that got obliterated without confirming with me first.
I’ll be switching to Obsidian for now, but I hope that something gets implemented that would prevent this from happening again.
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Thanks for letting us know what happened here! If you decided to give us a try again in the future, let us know. We’re happy to help get things working for you further.
On Friday last week I noticed that the notes I’d been keeping on my phone weren’t getting synced to the web app. I assumed something might be going on with the servers, and that it’d get synced and merged when the issue was fixed
Usually when you notice something like this on 1 particular device, it means your device isn’t communicating with our servers. It can be helpful to check your network connection to see if a different network helps, or if you may have a VPN or ad-blocker active, causing issues.
Since you’ve noted you’ve moved on to Obsidian, I won’t ask for further details here, but if you do decide you’d like to give us another try, you can just reply to this forum post.
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Hi, thanks for checking in. I’d be happy to provide more details. But I don’t think there’s much to add since other data loss related threads on here seemed to go unsolved due to the server being used as the absolute source of truth, even after an obvious mishap like this.
If there was a way of accessing local history and force pushing that to the server, I’d be happy to do that. Although I’d still be very concerned that a hard reset like this happened at all without confirming with the user, and with no clear explanation or reason. I feel uneasy using the app knowing that this might happen at any time.
fwiw, I’m using Simplenote on iOS, and was moving between different wifi connections as well as cellular, and no other apps or communications were experiencing issues. The problem was that the history got hard reset to the server’s latest copy from Thursday, instead of merging with my device’s local copy.
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@profoundlybluebirdb1348d3872 it’s possible your history is mixed up. The slider of the history might not show the records in chronological order because of how syncing works on Simplenote so it’s not obvious unless you know how it works.
For example, I might make a change on a note on Device A at 00:00 and the note doesn’t get synced to Simplenote servers probably due to an internet connection issue.
Then, I make another change on the same note on Device B at around 00:30 and the note does get synced to the Simplenote servers.
When I access Device A with an active internet connection, the changes I made at 00:00 will be synced to the server and overwrite the changes that were made on Device B.
In this case, the slider will show the record of 00:00 being the latest change, followed by 00:30.
Can you look through your history to see if the most recent changes may have been jumbled in this way?
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Hi Frank, I just checked my history in the web app and noticed that there’s a big gap between Jun 22 and and Jul 25 (today!), where several weeks worth of notes suddenly appear at all once. The missing notes from last Friday (Jul 19) don’t appear in any of the versions.
Not sure what to make of this tbh. The only thing I can think of is that this is a fairly big note that I’ve been maintaining for about a year, so maybe the system is having issues keeping it synced.
You mentioned that in your example scenario, the version made at 00:00 on Device A will overwrite the version made at 00:30 on Device B. Is this intended behavior, or should the user expect the text from both versions getting merged? I did notice that the note wasn’t getting synced to the web app, and it’s possible I made some trivial edit on the web app while seeing what was going on. In the past however, multi editing seems to have given me the merged result of both versions?
Also, in the above scenario, it seems that the expectation is that both versions should at least get uploaded to the server history, which sounds good. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have happened here. As a matter of fact, this new gap between Jun 22 and today makes the whole thing even more strange..
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You mentioned that in your example scenario, the version made at 00:00 on Device A will overwrite the version made at 00:30 on Device B. Is this intended behavior, or should the user expect the text from both versions getting merged? I did notice that the note wasn’t getting synced to the web app, and it’s possible I made some trivial edit on the web app while seeing what was going on. In the past however, multi editing seems to have given me the merged result of both versions?
Generally, these types of scenarios result in the differing data being merged into the note. However, there can be situations where the sync system believes that the data was removed in a later edit. These types of situations are very rare, but can still occur. In those situations, you can typically find the missing note content in the version history.
Also, in the above scenario, it seems that the expectation is that both versions should at least get uploaded to the server history, which sounds good. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have happened here. As a matter of fact, this new gap between Jun 22 and today makes the whole thing even more strange..
Just to confirm, have you checked the note’s history from the Simplenote web app? The web app retains more revisions in its history than what is available in the desktop and mobile apps.
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Hi Mike, I’ve checked the history from both the web app and the iOS app. On my phone, the history jumps from Jul 18 (Thursday) at 22:55 to yesterday (Jul 25), which is when I added some stuff to the note. On the web app, the history jumps from Jun 22 to yesterday.
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On my phone, the history jumps from Jul 18 (Thursday) at 22:55 to yesterday (Jul 25), which is when I added some stuff to the note. On the web app, the history jumps from Jun 22 to yesterday.
It sounds like there could be an issue with your iOS app. Can you please share a few more details? We’ll need to know the following:
- What devices you use Simplenote on
- Their operating systems and versions
- The Simplenote versions on each
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Hi Frank, I let my devices auto update, but here are the versions currently installed;
- iPhone 13 Pro Max, iOS 16.1.2, Simplenote version 4.51
- Windows 10 Home, build 19045.4651, Chrome version 127.0.6533.72, Simplenote web app
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Thanks for providing those details!
As you probably already know, if your data hasn’t previously synced to our servers, unfortunately, that means we won’t have your notes either.
You could try clearing the browsing data (including site data) in your web browser, and then sign back in. Also, please make sure you are using app.simplenote.com for the web app, no “/old”.
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Hi Frank, are there any plans on implementing local backups and force pushing so this can be avoided in the future?
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We don’t have any plans for supporting this at the moment. However, I have added your suggestion to our feature requests.
Thanks for your thoughtful suggestion!
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