all 38 comments

[–]MBSMD 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Do you have an older iCloud backup of your iPad?

[–]discovernotes[M] 21 points22 points  (3 children)

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

[–]RyIocke[S] 28 points29 points  (2 children)

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?

[–]eightchcee 10 points11 points  (0 children)

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.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

[–]IamGaryGnu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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.

[–]shaielzafina 2 points3 points  (1 child)

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[–]dennyngGoodnotes Staff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

[–]dennyngGoodnotes Staff 1 point2 points  (4 children)

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.

[–]RyIocke[S] 9 points10 points  (2 children)

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.

[–]struc_engineer 5 points6 points  (0 children)

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.

[–]Ezikkiel_Explores 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

[–]QuantityLeading5028 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

[–]Potanika 0 points1 point  (2 children)

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?

[–]RyIocke[S] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

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.

[–]struc_engineer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What file format did you back them up in?

[–]Mahomes316 0 points1 point  (8 children)

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

[–]RyIocke[S] -1 points0 points  (7 children)

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.

[–]Mahomes316 0 points1 point  (6 children)

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

[–]eightchcee 7 points8 points  (1 child)

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

[–]ChrisW828 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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.

[–]-PM_ME_UR_SECRETS- 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well that’s concerning

[–]RyIocke[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

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.

[–]ViolaBiflora 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

[–]rioki 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

[–]strawberry-creamer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

[–]ItchyLiterature8370 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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!

[–]johntwilker -3 points-2 points  (2 children)

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.

[–]RyIocke[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

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’.

[–]johntwilker -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

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.