iPad version 3.6.1 (44) synced stale document to server

[jgreely]

On recent installs (account created March 1st, so no big stash of historical data) of 3.6.1 on my Mac (10.15.7) and iPad Mini (14.4), I've been switching back and forth between the two clients, with the bulk of my writing being on the desktop side, and minor touch-up editing on the iPad.

Today, I happened to switch from desktop to iPad immediately after making a change, and the iPad client silently reverted several hours of changes and synced them up to the server. On both clients, I already had the specific document open, which is likely the root cause.

Specifically, the iPad's history has:
3:05 AM (16 characters removed)
11:38:20 AM (889 characters added)
11:38:20 AM (891 characters removed)
12:06:57 PM (3 characters removed)
...
12:08:57 PM (1 characters added)

While the desktop history has:
3:54:00 AM (17648 characters loaded)
10:17:43 AM (23 characters added)
....
11:14:28 AM (6 characters added)
11:37:59 AM (Title or metadata changed)
11:38:01 AM (9 characters added)
...
11:38:17 AM (10 characters added)
12:00:06 PM (889 characters removed)
12:07:22 PM (9 characters added)
12:08:07 PM (18 characters added)
12:08:57 PM (Title or metadata changed)

There are 36 remote revisions for this document, with the relevant ones being:
11:37:59 AM
12:00:04 PM

(there is no remote revision that includes the edits made between 11:38:01 and 11:38:17; those changes would be lost if it weren't for the local desktop history)

[JaspalSuri]

Hi @jgreely,

I'm so sorry to hear that. I will try to reproduce this issue and then will get in touch with the dev team. Please email help@standardnotes.org or standardnotes@protonmail.com with your notes syncing account's username and a link to this thread, just in case it's needed, so that way we can see if the server logs (for when notes were synced) can provide any useful insights.

[moughxyz]

Just to be sure I'm following:

The server will create a new revision history entry if the last revision entry is older than 5 minutes. So if you're on desktop, and let's say making active changes for 1 hour with a healthy network connection, you should see 12 revisions total for that hour.

What I'm not following is how you could edit the document for several hours on desktop with a healthy network connection, and not see any history entries for that time period that contains any subset of those changes?

(And just to be extra sure: the history entries you should be looking for are in the History menu, and not the Actions > Note History extension.)

those changes would be lost if it weren't for the local desktop history

Are you referring to History > Session? And are you saying you were able to recover the several hours of content using the Session history?

[jgreely]

[syncing username sent in email, as requested]

There are three server-side history entries before the ones I listed above: 10:17:34 AM, 10:54:16 AM, and 11:14:03 AM; I didn't include them because they didn't seem relevant, given that there was definitely one that was current, from right before I opened up the app on the iPad. The problem is that none of those were the version that the iPad considered current and let me edit, and since the new bit was at the end and I was just touching up wording at the beginning, I didn't notice until the damage was done.

(and, yes, it's the History menu; I have no "Note History" extension under Actions)

I successfully recovered all the text by doing a restore-as-copy of the last local desktop session, then merged it with the iPad-generated server revision using BBEdit's diff mode.

What it looks like to me is that because the iPad client already had the document loaded, it didn't try to pull down a fresh revision from the server until after I'd already made an edit (899 characters added and 891 removed in the same second; I think I removed a comma or something equally trivial).