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(2012-07-13) Simplenote And Notationalvelocity Dumping Local Notes

I have my Private Wiki running with PikiPiki on my MacBook Pro. I use Notational Velocity to synch that directory of notes (~2k of them) to the SimpleNote cloud. Then I use FlickNote on my Archos70 Tablet so I can read/write over there and later synch back up. I rarely edit with the SimpleNote WebApp or with Notational Velocity. Longer past notes at 2011-07-20-ArchosAndroid[[Private Wiki]].

Yesterday I was noticing that some notes I had just added or changed on my MacBook Pro weren't getting updated in the cloud after running Notational Velocity. One of the first times I launched NV there was a server error, with a pulldown I used to retry the synch. I also quit and restarted NV a few times, sometimes after making tiny edits in those recent notes in NV hoping to update their mod-date. (I know I looked at various settings inside NV, but don't think I changed anything; I also confirmed I'm already running the latest version.) Nothing mattered. Then later I suddenly realized that 50+ notes had completely disappeared from my MacBook Pro! Luckily they were still in SimpleNote. So I manually re-created them. Then I ran NV again, and another set of 50+ notes disappeared!

Today I

  • made a copy of my local directory - it has 1977 files in it
  • rescued the missing notes by hand (having my RecentChanges log made them easy to identify)
    • along the way I noticed that many notes seem to have dupes in SimpleNote. The content seemed identical.
  • made a copy of that rebuilt directory - 2037 files.
  • I am scared to re-run NV. Maybe I'll turn off my WiFi and run it, to see if it does anything without even synching.

Jul17 update - haven't been doing anything recently.

  • clear all notes in Tablet FlickNote
  • want to delete all my notes in SimpleNote cloud, but that doesn't seem possible without deleting my whole account.
    • posted question there. Also tweeted. Days later contacted through web-contact-form.
    • also noted Nv Alt fork of Notational Velocity, but its extra features aren't important to me.
  • noticed that had ~20 note files on laptop with .txt extension (because of WikiEngine, they're not supposed to have any extension), so I stripped out those extensions. (Most hadn't been edited in years. Maybe some glitch from when I first started using NV and never noticed.)
  • dumped NV Notes & Settings file

Jul23 get reply to my tweet saying they can manually reset my account. I say that sounds great.

Aug05 update

  • nothing ever got done
  • I finally just deleted my account
  • When I immediately tried to re-create an account with the same email address, it wouldn't let me. But I tried a couple days later and it did.
  • Launched NV having dumped its prefs. Set up prefs so it would suck in all the existing note files.
  • Set up NV/SimpleNote Data Synch, it's now pushing everything up to cloud.
  • Quit NV
  • Start running FlickNote on Archos70 to synch.
  • Suddenly realize that 40 files have disappeared from my local folder! (I had saved a copy before today's activities!) The copied folder has 2049, the new-reduced folder has 2001 plus the Settings file.

Aug06

  • upgrade SimpleNote to premium ($20/yr) - maybe the API throttling is the issue?
  • check a few locally-deleted notes - they're still in the cloud, and in FlickNote!. Unfortunately I don't see a way to get a total count of notes in the cloud.
  • launch NV again. It does some synching, then see alert "Simplenote error: internal server error". No change in local files (except adding an "Interim Note-changes" file by NV).
  • Tell NV to synch again. Get same error message. Quit NV, no time to play with this right now.
  • Hours later: launch NV again. It synchs quickly, makes no changes.
  • There seems to be no (user-viewable) log in NV, nor in SimpleNote.
  • posted update to original support thread.

Aug14

  • have gotten no replies/help
  • start to play with Python API wrapper
  • seems like get_note_list() doesn't let you just get few newest notes, so you have to wait for whole list (need to double-check this), which just took over a minute for me
  • seems like get_note_list() gives you a key for each note, but no title corresponding to my local filename, so will have to build/maintain my own local mapping dictionary, sucking down every single note once to get its key.
  • side-trip: can I just manually synch note files over a USB connection between my laptop and tablet? No, the FlickNote data isn't available. Grr I hate Android apps that work like that.
  • Aug17 update: got email back: For lots of notes, nvALT would be better, NV still uses an older version of the API that is much more prone to failure when dealing with large note sets.

Aug23: trying out Nv Alt.

  • uh-oh, doesn't seem like it will recognize Mac files that have no file extension and no type/creator, which is 99% of my Private Wiki files. Worst case, I suppose I could (a) mass-change existing files, and (b) tweak PikiPiki code to either set types or use extensions, but really hope not to have to.... [Tweeted](https://twitter.com/Bill Seitz/status/238706636754128896) question.
    • got no answer
    • wants file type of TEXT or utxt

Sept28: back to trying Nv Alt

  • wrote Python code to make changes to files - MacOS.SetCreatorAndType(fp, 'ttxt', 'TEXT')
  • as I told it to synch to SimpleNote it started splitting up my note files and adding file extensions, etc. So I force-quit it. Buh-bye.

Sept30: maybe change approaches by finding a NoteBook app for Android that uses Drop Box?

  • requirements
    • synch a folder of files, regardless of file type/extension
    • handle thousands of notes
    • edit PlainText, autosave as you leave a note
    • fast folder-list browse
    • fast fulltext search
  • options
    • darn, FlickNote does not.
    • Epistle - no folder support? It also specifically only indexes .txt files, other extensions like .md are not indexed by the app at all.
    • CatchNotes - has its own backup service, but no Drop Box - accessible from my Mac? Emailed.
    • Note Everything - no Drop Box support
    • Denote - requires .txt files, plus only synchs to a hard-coded single folder-name.
    • Inkpad Notepad from Work Pail - has its own synch? Emailed: Inkpad's sync-to-web feature unfortunately only works on so called "official" Android devices which include the Google Play app market and it's associated account mechanisms. I believe that the Archos 70 tablet does not include Google Play, and thus syncing is disabled.

Sept30: should I go back to the Python code? Or is it based on the same older API that is considered unsafe for large collections! OK, the Simperium API has a Python wrapper, too, so could switch to that, probably.

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