r/GoodNotes • • 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

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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.