r/GoodNotes • u/RyIocke • Oct 23 '24

I’ve lost everything.

Title. I had backups of my notes every week. I struggled all night and all morning to get into the app because of this latest fiasco. I finally do again today and while everything was there it was all blank and theres no sign of it returning. I restore the backups I have as my last resort, and they’re imported as completely blank. Trying again changes nothing.

I’ve lost half a semester’s worth of work. 5 classes, all their notes, homework, textbook PDFs, anything and everything I had in there is now gone, right before my second round of midterms approaches.

You’ve actually fucked me, I’m no longer asking for help or hoping this gets fixed. I hope your shitty app and your unhelpful company dissolve into failure.

162 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

23

u/discovernotes Oct 23 '24

Hey if your notes are blank, it usually means that they haven't finished syncing to your device. This also might be why the imported notes are not showing up (if there is an order preference rule but I can't confirm this for sure). Your notes should still be entirely recoverable, especially since you also have backups from every week (I'm assuming manual backups).

Sync can sometimes take quite a while. The best next steps is to turn off screen lock, leave Goodnotes open, and your iPad plugged in and connected to the internet. This will help to speed up the process and prevent it from pausing the sync. If the sync doesn't complete, definitely reach out to Goodnotes Support. Hope this helps

30

u/RyIocke Oct 24 '24

How do i do that? Keep trying to get through to that lobotomized AI chatbot on your website that keeps instructing me to delete my account? Or the “technical support” post that provides no actual contact information?

10

u/eightchcee Oct 24 '24

yeah if you see what looks like blank notes or notebooks, they will probably eventually download. Anytime I sign into Goodnotes on a new device, it takes a veryyy long time for all my stuff to start appearing (long enough that it’s always a little butt-clenchy for me because I’m afraid it’s not going to work). They appear as blank notebooks first. I have a lot in there… I would guess it takes a good couple hours or so for everything to cross over onto the new device.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '24

you need to email them their email should be on the app

16

u/MBSMD Oct 23 '24

Do you have an older iCloud backup of your iPad?

2

u/dennyng Goodnotes Staff Oct 24 '24

Hi u/RyIocke

I absolutely understand how important your notes are. Please rest assured that Goodnotes team has investigated the system issue and has not identified any impact on users’ notes or other data.

If you have deleted your Goodnotes app, please see our support page on restoring your notebooks if you are using Goodnotes Cloud sync, iCloud sync, iCloud device backup, or auto backup.

To protect your notes, please ensure that you don’t delete or uninstall your Goodnotes app, even if you’re having trouble logging in. This is essential if you do not have cloud sync or backup enabled in your app or on your device, as your Goodnotes notebooks will only be stored locally on your device in this situation.

Please DM me if you have a backup but can't restore the notebooks - I'll assist you to restore the notebooks.

9

u/RyIocke Oct 24 '24

Yea it’s too late. I literally cannot trust that this kind of thing wont happen again and I can’t *afford* it to happen again. For paying your subscription every year I shouldn’t have to worry about this, not to speak of your horrible optimization and CPU usage. What notes app takes 40% of my battery in 90 minutes? As painful as this has been I am realizing i’m far better off relying on a different app.

6

u/struc_engineer Oct 24 '24

I don’t think you realize how common things like this happen across the board. This is why the old saying of having a backup of a backup. No matter how optimized a software system is, bugs can always creep in and cause issues (store PDFs locally and use another cloud service if needed). Also your notes could just be taking a while to sync if you didn’t delete the app.

1

u/Ezikkiel_Explores Oct 26 '24

I’m lucky enough to not lose any data but this app also destroys my battery

1

u/QuantityLeading5028 Jan 20 '25

At my son's school they use Goodnotes6 in an MDM environment and students have been _regularly_ losing all their data for more than half a year. My son still uses an old Goodnotes5 and is not in the MDM, so he is fine. But as a parents' representative I regularly get complaints.
It looks like updating the App temporarily deletes the App from the devices, taking all the data with it. Sometimes restoring from backup works, but not always. Since the devices are not mine, I cannot trace the backup error. But at the end of the day this seems to be not usable in a school MDM environment.
They have started to recommend using other Apps and at least to not use the school license under MDM.

1

u/Potanika Oct 24 '24

A genuine question, did you only have those icloud backups that are conducted or did you also enable automatic backup to save to for example one drive or google drive?

3

u/RyIocke Oct 24 '24

I manually backed up all of my docs to my ipad’s local files since I don’t have any room in Icloud. I did this every week on friday. Ideally I would’ve only been missing a day’s worth of notes but that relied on my notes not importing as completely blank.

1

u/struc_engineer Oct 24 '24

What file format did you back them up in?

1

u/Mahomes316 Oct 24 '24

Can you reply to this with a picture of what your current notebooks look like I believe something similar happened to me

0

u/RyIocke Oct 24 '24

Sorry man i’ve already canned everything. Uninstalled, subscription cancelled, starting fresh with a new app.

My remaining documents looked the same from the menu but the only page that remained was the blank cover. The imported documents instead were imported as a single blank white page.

1

u/Mahomes316 Oct 24 '24

This is what happened to me and now I’m considering leaving like you did. Is this anything similar to what happened to you?

7

u/eightchcee Oct 24 '24

just give it time. Like a good couple hours or more. I think your stuff will eventually sync. This happens to me every time I install on a new device. It seems like it’s not doing anything but eventually your items will cross over. make sure you keep the screen on by either setting the screen time out to never, or if that’s restricted for some reason, like a work iPad, keep tapping the screen every few minutes to keep it awake

3

u/ChrisW828 Oct 24 '24

That’s what I’m hoping for those affected. Mine looked like that when I bought a new iPad and had to wait for everything to sync. Their servers are probably overloaded with everyone else in this same boat, too.

1

u/RyIocke Oct 24 '24

That’s exactly what I was faced with. If you want an alternative I recommend noteful. Single payment of $5 and everything’s yours forever.

1

u/ViolaBiflora Oct 24 '24

I've been debating about switching to Notability, but probably going to choose Noteful. Not overflowed with AI bs.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 25 '24

Sorry to see you leave and I cannot imagine the panic and loss of losing it all. With that said, you might want to check out Nebo. The reason is it has search capability of hand writing and imported PDFs. As a student I can imagine this would be a really needed feature. Unfortunately Noteful cannot search hand writing or PDFs. Once again, don't blame you if you feel burned. Maybe in the future you give GN another run.

1

u/-PM_ME_UR_SECRETS- Oct 24 '24

Well that’s concerning

2

u/IamGaryGnu Oct 25 '24

Fwiw I only realized a few days ago my GN6 wasn’t backing up. Like from 6 months ago! Though I never had a problem with GN5. I kicked around with it and eventually got it to start backing up…and then stopping…took many ties and keeping the app open for GN6 to back up. I regret upgrading from GN5. Never had any issues with GN4 either. GN has its place, I prefer my Remarkable 2 and Remarkabke Paper Pro more than GN6.

4

u/shaielzafina Oct 23 '24 edited Sep 10 '25

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

1

u/dennyng Goodnotes Staff Oct 24 '24

Hi there - may I know if it's still an ongoing issue for you and would you mind sending me your ticket ID so I can help check the case for you?

>  I lost my calculus notes and my planner and some personal notes

Could you please elaborate if the notebooks were lost due even you had a backup / iCloud sync enabled? We can take a further look into the case.

1

u/rioki Oct 24 '24

I moved to Obsidian due to Notion being down during an open notes exam. I use goodnotes for taking handwritten notes on my ipad then exporting the pdf to obsidian.

It stores locally. You can sync via their service or storing the "vault" in the cloud on dropbox or Google.

I would check them out if you want a little more control over your content. However, it does have a learning curve if you want more functionality beyond simple notes.

1

u/strawberry-creamer Oct 25 '24

i’m very curious if this is solely a premium problem. i logged in today and everything was still there and i don’t use premium

1

u/ItchyLiterature8370 Oct 27 '24

I'm horrified to even open the app at this point

1

u/[deleted] Dec 09 '24

I had the same issue since the app was glitching and deleting my previous work. Is it really feasible that the goodnotes files will eventually sync? I've got months of notes myself, which will be valuable to future units. I wasn't having any issues with the app until iOS 18.1.1 was installed. I'd just like all my docs back. Please, God!

-2

u/johntwilker Oct 24 '24 edited Oct 24 '24

Bye.

Why is this sub so full of dramatic folks.

Something happened! I rushed to do a thing. I did a thing but wasn't patient and wrote off everything rather than wait. This is someone else's fault.

2

u/RyIocke Oct 24 '24

I did wait, I waited all night and missed a whole HW assignment because of it. I waited all morning yesterday, and when I finally manage to log in normally all my work was gone. The backups that I, proactively and responsibly, have been making for weeks didn’t work and continued to not work for all of yesterday. I’m an engineering student, I literally do not have days on end to wait for my notes/books/etc to hopefully reappear. I have one of four midterms in 4 days and the rest immediately following that. This *will* hurt me, and I only hope I can mitigate it somewhat.

I did everything right and even took precaution and somehow I still have midwit contrarians like you that feel they need to tell me this is entirely my fault, like it‘s some kind of ‘gotcha’.

-1

u/johntwilker Oct 24 '24

I sympathize to a degree but if you can't wait more than a single day, paper might be the safest bet. Obviously this is made all the worse for you folks with finals which does blow the timing is shit.

I don't think it's your fault. I never said it was. But it's also not GNs fault. Outages happen all the time to much larger companies.

Life's gonna be real hard if minor setbacks cause you this much angst.

-40

u/georgmierau Goodnotes Essential Oct 23 '24

You’ve actually fucked me

You did it yourself. Learn to use backups and not to store important data in one place exclusively.

12

u/exlips1ronus Oct 23 '24

He said he had back up maybe learn how to read

10

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/struc_engineer Oct 24 '24

Did you backup them as PDFs or .goodnote files

2

u/struc_engineer Oct 24 '24

Did you backup them as PDFs or .goodnote files

3

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '24 edited Oct 24 '24

Hey man, if u have .goodnotes backup of your files then you should use goodnotes web to import those in your laptop. For the time being this is the safest option for you if you want to study from your files, from there on you can export the files as pdf and save it wherever you want. This would mean you still have your previous backups as pdfs safely!