iPhone Note Sync Leads to Lost Information
While I applaud Apple’s effort to bring the iPhone notes onto my desktop through Mail sync, the implementation leaves a bit to be desired. Twice now I have lost a significant amount of information due to the way Apple syncs the notes.
If you use your iPhone to take notes on the fly as much as I do, you know how painful it is to think about losing any of those precious bits of data. Mark/Sync used to work pretty well, or just emailing them one by one. Generally Apple’s sync works, with one notable exception:
If you leave a note open (that is, you don’t press “Done” or go back to the main notes menu) and then sync with your computer, for some crazy reason Apple will actually pull the old version of the note from your computer and erase any recent additions you’ve made to the note on your phone. Worse yet, even if you’ve saved the note (pressed “Done”) since your last sync, it will STILL grab the one from the computer rather than even reverting back to your last mobile version, which would be slightly less catastrophic.
Lessons learned here until Apple fixes this: 1) Always press “Done” on your note before syncing with your computer. Always! 2) Generally if you are in the habit of putting new thoughts on new notes instead of updating an old one, you’ll probably be better off.
I love my iPhone, but every once in awhile Apple just really gets it wrong. It’s surprising since I’m so used to everything else working so well. No one should have to close/save anything that seems to do so automatically and worry about losing information. I might look into switching app’s, and have Evernote installed. But Apple’s notes are just quick and easy. The screenshot below is from Apple’s Web site. I only wish “Never leave a note behind” were true in this case.
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Categories: Gadget, Technology |
you haven’t happened to find a way of accessing the iphone root and recovering this information have you? i just lost some pretty significant notes…
I haven’t dug any deeper, but it seems that recently note syncing has gotten much more reliable, at least for me.
I seen enough cases of lost notes that I decided they weren’t all senior moments. I suspect it is the done button effect you mentioned. IOS 4? Perhaps it is the newly introduced task suspension that keeps the last changes from being saved when the app is exited.
Thanks for the insight!
Haha, good point. Perhaps the iPhone is selectively eliminating all of the things we really didn’t need to write down in the first place.
I have noticed that the syncing problem seems to have gotten better recently (iPhone 4), with the Mac notifying me of conflicts and asking me which version I want.
However, on the flip side I have noticed that there are times when I add something to an existing note and the iPhone accesses the network (apparently doing some kind of sync) and within seconds of writing something it will literally disappear before my eyes!
Bottom line is the same, just always make a new note if you don’t want to lose something, or try another app.
I’ve seen that same behavior and HATE it:
“I have noticed that there are times when I add something to an existing note and the iPhone accesses the network (apparently doing some kind of sync) and within seconds of writing something it will literally disappear before my eyes!”
An update as I continue to stumble through this. I noticed under the Mail preferences on my iPhone that my Notes were set to sync to several mail accounts, including my Gmail, which I don’t use for much. When I upgraded to iOS4, it must have somehow switched my notes from syncing with Mail to syncing with Google (over the air). So that makes sense that it was doing some kind of “live” update, but does NOT make sense that the Gmail sync was wiping out things practically as I typed!
The solution? I turned off all mail account note syncing, including Gmail, then reset the notes syncing by turning it off, then on again. Of course none of my new notes synced back up with Mail, but they are still in my Gmail account.
I see some merit to all these new syncing features, but not at the expense of just being able to take notes reliably! I would especially preferred not to have them automatically turned on with an OS update. Oh well, onward we go through new tech trials.