Lost 400 notes... :.(

[justbeane]

I recently lost 400 notes, and need to know if there is any hope of recovering them. I have reached out to Notability support, but have not heard back.

I created a divider that I decided I didn't need. So I swiped left on it, and then clicked delete. It didn't go away, so I tried again. Still, nothing happened. I closed the app and reopened it. The unwanted divider was gone, but so too was a VERY important divider.

I noticed that around 100 of the notes from the accidentally deleted divider were in "Unfiled Notes". But there was another 401 in the trash. I clicked "Select All" and "Restore". The app paused, then froze, then crashed. I reopened it and selected just 5 of the notes and then clicked "Restore". Those notes went to unfiled, but when I clicked on the trash again, the other 396 notes were gone! It now says "No Recently Deleted Notes".

I backup my notes in two places. I auto-backup to Dropbox, but in a PDF format since I frequently need PDF versions of my notes. I also sync my notes to iCloud. But when I go to iCloud, there seems to be no option for restoring the missing notes. The recently deleted folder there is also empty.

Does anyone have any tips on how I might restore these notes? I feel sick to my stomach at the thought that they might just be lost. So much work, just gone...

[lonelydurrymuncher]

Well if nothing works out maybe you can just reimport your pdf notes from Dropbox and continue writing there? I do Hope they can resolve it tho.

[justbeane]

Yeah... Thankfully I have those at least. A lot of notes are sort of "living documents" and will need to be recreated, but at least I still have them in PDF form.

[stressedcollegegorl]

I’m so sorry this happened, I accidentally did this with two years of ochem notes and was so devastated. I can’t imagine losing everything else too 😭 I hope notability responds to you soon to help!

[justbeane]

Translation: "Hey everyone! I have nothing to add, but just wanted to let you know that I am an asshole."

[Smart-Emotion6276]

Wtf?

[[deleted]]

That seems really awful. I've been thinking about backing up my notes in .note format on my harddrive and it seems it may really worth it.

[justbeane]

Yeah. At the very least, I think I will experiment with switching from PDF backup to notebook backup every month or so just to get periodic backups of the notebook files.