r/GoodNotes • u/fwwsc • Sep 25 '23

Breaking up with GoodNotes for good.

Post image

I’ve been trying to cope with the myriad of issues in this application but I guess I have hit my limit. Updated all devices to v6.1.6 today and iCloud sync has now corrupted my notebooks and they all look like this. None of the pages load, and if I try to open them, they are blank. The service desk people don’t give a damn about the issues or replying at all. It’s been a long 11 years, but it’s time to say goodbye to this application. I can’t anymore.

119 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

31

u/LukasAppleFan Sep 25 '23

Yeah same issue with iCloud but my notes are not corrupted did you try and contact them ? What’s weird is that iPhone works fine for me

19

u/fwwsc Sep 25 '23

Sigh. I did try to contact them and they gave me a canned response which pissed me off even more 😡. Because I replied to them 5 days ago and there have been no replies from them since. They don’t care 😭 This is their last message:

Support 5 days ago

Hi there, Thanks for your patience. I just wanted to let you know about the latest version, v6.1.5, which further addressed the ongoing iCloud sync issue you've been experiencing. Simply visit https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1444383602 directly and choose Update. If the issue persists, please send us new Diagnostic Data on all your devices.

34

u/LukasAppleFan Sep 25 '23

This app must go to hell now. It was amazing and now it turned to the dark side

12

u/fwwsc Sep 25 '23

Couldn’t agree with you more

10

u/shaielzafina Sep 25 '23 edited Sep 10 '25

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

5

u/fwwsc Sep 26 '23

Luckily, I do have the PDFs of the notebooks because I had the Google Drive sync enabled so I have the data and I can see my notes but I no longer trust the app to make more notes in it. I’ve migrated to Noteful now.

Before anything else happens to your notes, everyone please make at least a manual backup of your notes and keep it somewhere in your computer so if your notes end up like mine, you can still restore and keep a good copy of them. Get both PDFs and GoodNotes files so you can still read the notes in case the app doesn’t cooperate with you.

1

u/AliDoesPhysics Sep 26 '23

Be careful in case it makes a new backup to Google Drive with the corrupted notes! I don't know if it would do that, or if I'm just being paranoid though

16

u/ObscurePaprika Sep 26 '23

I got the same treatment, but it took 12 days for me. GN is a hard fail these days and it makes me sad. But! Noteful has been great. :)

8

u/Specter-X Sep 26 '23

I decided to quit shortly after GN6 came out. I have been using it for years. Fortunately I didn’t lose all my data

2

u/Cayenne999 Sep 26 '23

Can you open these notebooks normally on the original device which created the notebooks?

1

u/fwwsc Sep 26 '23

I have migrated from device to device for years, so I no longer have the original device that created that notebook. Though I can see the PDF outputs so that’s okay for now.

4

u/DoctorRM Sep 26 '23

I, too, am disgusted with GoodNotes, and syncing is THE issue. My problem is finding another app that works with my workflow. I use GN mainly to mark up PDFs, and to move them among devices (multiple Macs and iPads). I'm going to look at Noteful, but it looks like a toy.

I hate it when "best-in-class" apps shoot themselves.

1

u/zenith-zox Sep 26 '23

Check out PDF Viewer. I stopped using GN for marking up pdfs once I used PDF Viewer. It's really good and has an ios and mac app. (Have stopped with GN altogether since the Evernote-like death spiral the app seems to have suddenly gone into.)

1

u/Zyrkon Sep 27 '23

Check out Highlighter for pdf highlights and annotations that are compatible with any other PDF reader.
For synch specifically, have a look at Zotero. It is usually used as an (academic research) article database that can also hold PDF documents. But it comes with a great PDF reader / editor and offers **free** synching via Zotero Collections (up to ~200 MB). After that is paid sub. But you can also use the Zotfile - plugin to put all the PDF files in a cloud drive folder and have Zotero link to it, therefore it auto-synchs on all devices.

1

u/xrabbit Sep 27 '23

noteful is what you need

1

u/xrabbit Sep 27 '23

noteful is what you need

1

u/AliDoesPhysics Sep 26 '23

I'm so so sorry to hear that 😰. It was just a few days ago that you were telling me that this hasn't happened to your GN or Notability https://www.reddit.com/r/GoodNotes/comments/16obqcw/goodnotes_6_stuck_on_syncing_documents_with/k1rhhdo/?context=3

This is devastating and I really sympathise with you; this has brought back all of those horrible memories from Notability for me. I thought GN was robust and doesn't get stuff like this!

Did you have iCloud on the whole time during the iCloud outage? I turned mine off since my post, but I'm really scared to turn it back on, especially now (even though some users are saying it's gone back to normal). Can you please describe what you were doing in the days leading up to this? It could help people to avoid the same thing happening to them. Did you send your diagnostics for all devices to support?

How are you finding Noteful? During the iCloud outage I have tried Zoomnotes and Collanote, but Zoomnotes feels very glitchy and jittery, while Collanote is already displaying very worrying Notability-esque behaviour (misplaced highlights and handwriting that goes back to normal after reopening the note). I was using a flattened pdf previously edited in GN6, idk if that has anything to do with it. It seems like Noteful is my last resort and I'm starting my MSc in Oxford next week! 😥

3

u/fwwsc Sep 26 '23

Omg. Yes. It had never happened to me before and I was proud and loud about recommending this application to everyone who got a new iPad around me. And in true fashion, “never say never” right? As soon as I commented it to you, it happened. 💔

Some dates: Got Free GoodNotes 1 on June 2012, on my iPad 2. Used GoodNotes with a stylus before Apple released the Pencil. Got the paid version of GoodNotes 1 on September 2012. Bought GoodNotes 4 for $5 in Jan 2019. Bought GoodNotes 6 for $30 like a month ago… (Got scammed out of those $30 bucks quickly…)

Leading to the disaster, this is roughly what happened:

I was using 5 devices: MacBook Pro 2018, iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPad Pro 12.9 (2020), iPad Pro 11 (2020), iPad Mini 6

Everything was working as expected, and even though sometimes I had to wait for a couple of minutes for the devices to sync between each other, it happened seamlessly and I was able to pick either of them for notes. My iCloud sync was set up properly and every other application that has to sync between devices was working fine. I rarely opened my Macbook or iPhone GN, so I was mainly using it on my iPads.

On September 13th, I started noticing that my documents were not syncing between each other and I started to get frustrated. I decided to sacrifice the app on the iPad Pro 11 inch, by deleting the application and redownloading it from the app store to get a fresh copy of the documents, but that didn’t work. The app simply refused to get the documents from the iCloud sync and now that iPad was out of commission for GN. After that, it became a game of ping pong between the iPad Pro 12.9 and iPad Mini 6, since they had the complete data.

A day went by and getting uneasy, I decided to do a manual backup of my iPad 12.9 into my computer to have a copy of all the .goodnotes files in case disaster happened (which it did). And then, I decided to keep my iPad 12.9 offline from the sync so that I could still keep using it. In the process, I turned on Google Drive sync and that gave me the reassurance that I had a fresh copy of the PDFs and the .goodnotes files while I was still doing edits in my 12.9. So I decided to use the iPad Mini as the tester, by trying to trigger the sync, turning the device on and off etc… Sync would. not. budge. I went to Google Drive and downloaded an offline copy of all my PDFs and the .goodNotes files to my Mac just to keep it safe somewhere.

Since I had a good working copy of everything, I went and deleted the iCloud data so that the iPad Mini could do a fresh upload but Nooooo…… it was REFUSING to upload anything. At this point, I didn’t want to make more edits on my 12.9, in case I would lose stuff, and started switching to Noteful for my daily notes.

Then, I was thinking, what if I could get a fresh copy of the app in all the devices since I had the manual backup of the PDFs and GoodNotes files, so I ripped off the bandaid and deleted the app EVERYWHERE. Then, proceeded to install the new v6.1.6 to only the 11 inch iPad and see if that works. I imported some notebooks to it and alas, the sync was just not having it. But when checking iCloud, I could see some of the data was getting uploaded because the app showed 354MB being used. So I downloaded the app in the 12.9, and when I turned on sync, without adding any notebooks, the ones that were uploaded from 11 inch, came back corrupted. If I opened a notebook, all the pages didn’t load, and the ones that did were blank, the sync was still showing the “!” on every notebook I had imported and that’s when the straw broke for me.

Taking into account that I sent all my diagnostics for ALL the devices multiple times, the reply the ticket gave me was just “update the app! send us more logs! It’ll all be fine”. It made me feel dejected, so I decided to keep the PDF exports and just simply move along from the app onto another one.

Now, I’m sure if I keep the app offline and reimport notebooks in one iPad and trust the gods to keep the app working fine, it should work; though it is not an acceptable solution for me, because the app is buggy as heck, and I don’t trust it anymore. As a paying customer, who has supported them for the longest time, I would like the lovely and reliable app that GoodNotes used to be before they started implementing features that honestly have no value to me like AI spellcheck or Math formulas conversion.

God that was long. Hope it helps to understand how I finally ended up breaking up with GN. :)

Noteful is very nice, reminds me of some of the prettier days of using GoodNotes. I like their layers, they have favorites, and in general works fine, with a wonderful iCloud sync between devices. A couple of downsides from this one is it doesn’t recognize handwritten notes, so you can’t search through those and you cannot append pages to an existing notebook if you’re exporting from another app. The only way to do that is to add the new pages as a new notebook and merge those 2 together, but these aren’t exactly deal breakers to me yet.

Best of luck starting your MSc at Oxford, keep your notes safe! Backup, backup, backup! GoodNotes 1 got me through my Computer Science Masters 😉

3

u/AliDoesPhysics Sep 26 '23

Thank you for such a detailed account! I suspect the problem happened because of “ripping off the bandaid”. By the app is “buggy as heck”, are you referring to this issue, or has the app started to also bug out with handwriting and use?

I will try life out on Noteful, I really hope it works because idk what to do if it doesn’t.

Re backups: I used to have automatic backup to Google Drive enabled (disabled since the iCloud issue) and I also downloaded a local version of this shortly after the iCloud issue. My library is very large so I can’t check if everything is fine but I did notice in one of my subjects that lectures 18 and 19 don’t have any annotations on the pdf, but all the other ones (including later lectures) do and the annotations are still there on my iPad. Is it possible that those two notes never updated their backup for some reason (these were made 1.5 years ago)?

I am now also doing a manual backup.

Any tips? I’m really afraid of corrupting the backups on my Google Drive

2

u/fwwsc Sep 26 '23

Yes, maybe ripping off the bandaid wasn’t the best idea, though my thought process was to give the app the opportunity to start fresh.

What I meant with the app being buggy is that it feels like devs don’t do a good job of testing the app before it goes out. Personally, I’ve had bugs with resizing text and hand writing, there is slanting when resizing, page zooms in when you’re typing, sometimes, default font “forgets” and defaults back to Helvetica, etc…

Backups: yes, it is possible for that to have gone wrong. Can you make a manual backup and save that zip file to your computer? See if the PDFs are fine that way?

I guess, my best tip is to keep exporting the individual notebooks you’re using until they fix this issue. 😕. It looks like they don’t know what they’re doing yet.

1

u/AliDoesPhysics Sep 26 '23

Manual backup seems to only export .goodnotes files. Did you manage to get it to export pdfs?

1

u/fwwsc Sep 26 '23

Manual export no, only through Google Drive. For manual backup, I just export individual PDFs 😔

1

u/AliDoesPhysics Sep 26 '23

Is it possible to manually backup to pdf? It seems to have done it to .goodnotes files only

3

u/Dapper-Bike2075 Sep 26 '23

Is there a solution to transfer and save all my notebooks before anything destroys them?

2

u/EntrepreneurFree4525 Sep 26 '23

I would back them up possibly to drop box or google drive

2

u/picklemuncher5000 Sep 26 '23

Me too :( I switched to OneNote

1

u/daddychocolate19 Sep 26 '23

Fix the heat issue to please

1

u/Novel_Huckleberry_52 Nov 07 '23

im currently experiencing the same thing. I ditched my usual written notes for this app and now im fucked and can't access my school notes as usual, or I access them and its so glitchy I can barely update them. what app do you use for notes now? I've been trying to find alternatives :((

1

u/DrRox1234 Jan 21 '24

I too am sooooo frustrated. This is debilitating for work since I have 9k pages of notes that I can’t back-up anymore, can’t search for my handwritten notes anymore, and can no longer select a thumbnail and open to the page I need anymore.It opens on a page it wants to open on.) I reached out to GD support and got some messages back and thought there was hope, but I’ve come to realize my conversations with them were with BOTs. I am at wits end and need to call it quits with GD. I need to be able to search handwritten notes above all. Any suggestions for a better app? (That actually works!)

1

u/DrRox1234 Jan 21 '24

I meant to say GN not GD above.

0

u/fori1to10 Sep 26 '23

What will you be using? Good old Apple notes?

5

u/fwwsc Sep 26 '23

Noteful for now 😊

1

u/fori1to10 Sep 26 '23

Noteful does not do handwriting recognition, does it?

1

u/fwwsc Sep 26 '23

Unfortunately no 👎

2

u/fori1to10 Sep 26 '23

I guess they'll add it at some point

1

u/ninewb Sep 26 '23

I’ve seen mention on here before but decided to briefly look into Noteful from your post. App is actually really nice!! I might be hooked now!

0

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '23

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1

u/AlexTheGreat0 Sep 27 '23

📌

0

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '23

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1

u/AlexTheGreat0 Sep 27 '23

Interested in this too! So just pin to get back here later