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Giving Up on Notes : Alternatives?

Laisha

Laisha

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 21, 2014
152
29
Far northern Maine.
For no apparent reason, everything I've saved in Notes in the past week has gone missing. They are not in my Mac or my iPhone.

Furthermore, though there are many notes in the app, none of them show up until I begin typing in the SEARCH bar.

So...Two questions:

1. Can anyone tell me what might have gone wrong?

2. Looking now for an alternative to Notes. It's become too much trouble. So...any feedback on Evernote or OneNote which might be helpful in making up my mind where to turn? Ease of use and stability being the two main things, of course, the other important things might be whether or not I have to save or do they automatically do that for me and how big "too big" is regarding documents/files within either.

Thanks for any input you have for me.
 
I hope you can recover your notes and export them to plain text.

I use Simplenote because I write plain text notes (with multi markdown) and it works well on iOS and OS X. For my older MacBook with Snow Leopard I use the web version.

I have written a shell script to rename the text files when downloading all notes from Simplenote's web version. Also nValt saves Simplenote notes into plain text. This is helpful as you can save them into Dropbox directly.

I'm fine with one folder for all my notes because they're named as yyyymmdd-tag-title; so for example 20160209-nart-Everything-buckets is a "note" about an "article" of Everything buckets written today (2016 feb 9).
 
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But this could happen to other services too, right? If you dont have backup, you can loose it. I dont think evernote, or simplenote is any better here.
 
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Laisha said:
For no apparent reason, everything I've saved in Notes in the past week has gone missing. They are not in my Mac or my iPhone.

Furthermore, though there are many notes in the app, none of them show up until I begin typing in the SEARCH bar.

So...Two questions:

1. Can anyone tell me what might have gone wrong?

2. Looking now for an alternative to Notes. It's become too much trouble. So...any feedback on Evernote or OneNote which might be helpful in making up my mind where to turn? Ease of use and stability being the two main things, of course, the other important things might be whether or not I have to save or do they automatically do that for me and how big "too big" is regarding documents/files within either.

Thanks for any input you have for me.
Click to expand...
I don't know what might be going wrong with your Notes, but I can offer a suggestion for an alternative...

nvAlt on OSX using plain text stored in DropBox. Notesy/Writeroom/PlainText on iOS accessing the same text on DropBox.

I have found this combination to be highly reliable and syncing has been rock-solid in my experiences.

I used EverNote, but it has become bloated and cumbersome. I use OneNote on certain occasions but I find syncing very sporadic. I've tracked the issue down to the use of OneDrive. Even attempting to use OneDrive in other scenarios has resulted in files not syncing.
 
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Kapybarus said:
But this could happen to other services too, right? If you dont have backup, you can loose it. I dont think evernote, or simplenote is any better here.
Click to expand...

As I mentioned, I download a backup from Simplenote web site and also nvALT syncs every single note as a text file into a dropbox folder. That last resource saves every note at least in three different places; Simplenote server, my computer, Dropbox server
 
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Laisha said:
For no apparent reason, everything I've saved in Notes in the past week has gone missing. They are not in my Mac or my iPhone.

Furthermore, though there are many notes in the app, none of them show up until I begin typing in the SEARCH bar.

So...Two questions:

1. Can anyone tell me what might have gone wrong?

2. Looking now for an alternative to Notes. It's become too much trouble. So...any feedback on Evernote or OneNote which might be helpful in making up my mind where to turn? Ease of use and stability being the two main things, of course, the other important things might be whether or not I have to save or do they automatically do that for me and how big "too big" is regarding documents/files within either.

Thanks for any input you have for me.
Click to expand...
[doublepost=1455132703][/doublepost]unsure why you would've lost yours - do you not have an iCloud account?
all my Notes are automatically stored there and sync seamlessly between MB and iPhone.
if you really need an alternative, Evernote is pretty good
 
Are you an MS Office user? If yes, I see no reason to not fully endorse OneNote. The Notes will follow you everywhere across platforms.
 
I used to use Evernote because I want notes I can see on my iPhone, iPad, Windows PC, and Mac. But with Evernote's increasing pressure to force people into a paid subscription for formerly free features coupled with the fact the MS has released decent iOS and Mac versions of OneNote - I bit the bullet and moved all my notes from Evernote to OneNote. I haven't noticed any syncing issues (yet anyway).
 
I have to give a nod to Evernote. I'm a writer and frequent note-taker; I use my Mac, iPad and iPhone all the time. Evernote syncs brilliantly with them all. But some people may prefer something simpler--for me, the ability to add an alarm to notes, to take photos within the Evernote app, and many other features, is very useful. My suggestion is to give it a try.
 
I use Evernote also for pretty much all of my note taking for work, personnel, and school. I like being able to view my notes on any device as long as I have a network connection. However, I am not liking the fact they have gone to a new CEO and have started to kill off some other products. Makes me a little worried about the stability of the company.

I really like it though.
 
Speaking to the Evernote users, did you receive the survey they sent out and if so did you take it? I would not be surprised if they are going to update their pricing model and there will be increases.
 
Both Evernote and OneNote are decent options. I've gone back and forth over the years, and have settled on OneNote in past years because I find their UI more obvious, their handwriting support better, and they have been making a big push towards having feature parity on every platform. It's not there yet, but it's been nice to see how fast things have developed. I believe Evernote has a maximum individual note size of 50MB for non-paid accounts, but that information could be outdated. Either system will save your work automatically. I do find that OneNote has been less likely to bother me about conflicting changes than Evernote, even though I use OneNote in our office with many shared notebooks with dozens of collaborators and notebooks exceeding 1GB in size, and used Evernote as a single stand-alone user.
 
Long time Evernote Premium user, but I'm uncertain about their future. I'm currently migrating ~ 4000 notes to Apple Notes. No harm in having a Plan B ready, and if it works out, I've just found a way to save $50 / year.
 
nightcap965 said:
Long time Evernote Premium user, but I'm uncertain about their future. I'm currently migrating ~ 4000 notes to Apple Notes. No harm in having a Plan B ready, and if it works out, I've just found a way to save $50 / year.
Click to expand...
are web clippings something that can be migrated to apple notes?
 
nightcap965 said:
The migration attempt failed miserably. I wish Notes were serious competition for Evernote, but it isn't.
Click to expand...

I could've told you that. Evernote is outstanding. I wouldn't worry too much about their future. If they fail, someone will swoop in to save them. It's too popular of a solution at this point.
 
Give Notability a try. I've migrated from Evernote > Apple Note > OneNote and Notability seems to be the best so far. Plus it's got Apple Pencil support so it's pretty awesome if you have an iPad Pro.
 
halledise said:
[doublepost=1455132703][/doublepost]unsure why you would've lost yours - do you not have an iCloud account?
all my Notes are automatically stored there and sync seamlessly between MB and iPhone.
if you really need an alternative, Evernote is pretty good
Click to expand...

It was, you might say, a perfect storm. Hard drive failed, online backup did something weird where the last backup was only partial and that overwrote the second-to-the-last one.

I had also backed up to iCloud because I'm from the DOS days and remember vividly what happened when you forgot to back up. But that copy is the one that is missing much of the data.

I've since learned my lesson. I moved back to Carbonite and also use Time Machine.
[doublepost=1459567843][/doublepost]
BuffaloTF said:
Are you an MS Office user? If yes, I see no reason to not fully endorse OneNote. The Notes will follow you everywhere across platforms.
Click to expand...

I am. And I will try it.
[doublepost=1459567925][/doublepost]
fhall1 said:
I used to use Evernote because I want notes I can see on my iPhone, iPad, Windows PC, and Mac. But with Evernote's increasing pressure to force people into a paid subscription for formerly free features coupled with the fact the MS has released decent iOS and Mac versions of OneNote - I bit the bullet and moved all my notes from Evernote to OneNote. I haven't noticed any syncing issues (yet anyway).
Click to expand...

Yeah. I tried Evernote but the nagging was far too much for me to deal with.
 
I have been using Google Keep, if you just need simple notes it should do the trick, and its cross platform compatible obviously, can even access it through website. (keep.google.com)
 
Laisha said:
For no apparent reason, everything I've saved in Notes in the past week has gone missing. They are not in my Mac or my iPhone.

Furthermore, though there are many notes in the app, none of them show up until I begin typing in the SEARCH bar.

So...Two questions:

1. Can anyone tell me what might have gone wrong?

2. Looking now for an alternative to Notes. It's become too much trouble. So...any feedback on Evernote or OneNote which might be helpful in making up my mind where to turn? Ease of use and stability being the two main things, of course, the other important things might be whether or not I have to save or do they automatically do that for me and how big "too big" is regarding documents/files within either.

Thanks for any input you have for me.
Click to expand...


OneNote is free from Microsoft and is fully ported to IOS. Works great and I use it daily.
[doublepost=1459957582][/doublepost]
sracer said:
As I mentioned earlier, OneNote syncing can be a sketchy affair. At the very least a person should give it a test before committing to it.
Click to expand...

Have been using it for a year. Never an issue.
 
I am absolutely enamored with OneNote. I run it on my MBP, iPhone, and at work I have to use a Galaxy Tab and have it on there as well. It syncs great across all the devices and is a breeze to use. I haven't had the same issues others have had with the syncing as mine has synced perfectly across iOS and Android devices.

Until they do something to drastically screw it up, I will probably never consider switching from it.
 
It is nearly impossible for me to use OneNote across more than one device without having to troubleshoot one issue or another. Here's a typical error I get...

Screenshot 2016-04-16 05.36.33.png


...and here is a recommended solution.
 
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