[Bug]: Export Notebook - Incomplete export

[fowlesp]

evernote-backup version

1.9.3

What OS are you using?

Windows

OS Version / Linux distribution

Windows 11

Bug description

1. run 'evernote-backup.exe --verbose export --single-notes .\2024-04-02 '
2. during export notebooks appear to be sucessfully exported BUT checking folder content shows the export is incomplete - NOT all notes are exported
3. using --verbose option shows notebook export ok

Please investigate and fix

Log excerpt

[thedaveCA]

I'm trying to backup to notebooks rather than single notes, but I started spot-checking and quickly found the same, at least half of the notebooks I have checked are missing one or more notes.

In a couple of smaller notebooks I've been able to inspect the notebooks in Evernote and I don't see anything particularly interesting or unique about them (but I admit I have not dug into the internals at all, I am only inspecting from the client). One was a single-image note, another was some text I jotted directly into Evernote via the mobile client mid-meeting some years ago.

Evernote's own client is struggling with some notes (and just discarding the entire folder), but seemingly on different notes, one of the folders where Evernote-Backup completed the export is one that Evernote itself is unable to complete.

Happy to produce logs if it would be useful.

[vzhd1701]

Could you please share samples of some of the notes that fail to export via evernote-backup?

[AltoRetrato]

There can be two possible issues here: the notes are not being synced, or the notes are synced but not being exported.

You can check the SQLite database created by evernote-backup to see if the missing notes are actually there:

sqlite3 en_backup.db
select guid, is_active, title from notes where title like "%partial or full note title%";

But I wonder if, since you're using --single-notes, the issue is related with the file name being used. If the file name is based on the note title, remember that a note title can:

• Contain invalid file name characters, such as \ / : * ? " < > |
• Be reserved names: CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1 to COM9, LPT1 to LPT9
• End with a dot or end/start with a space (these cases are not supported by all Windows API)
• Be quite long - default max full path (folder + filename) is 260 characters unless long path support is enabled

So the first and easiest thing you can do is check the titles of the missing notes for the limitations above. I wrote a script to find those and other issues automatically, so I could rename my notes in Evernote before exporting them to Obsidian.

If none of that helps, one way to try to reproduce the issue is to copy some of those missing notes (ideally the smaller ones, with sensitive contents scrubbed) into a new Evernote notebook and see if they now sync / get exported. If they still don't, you can export the notebook from Evernote and send it to vzhd1701.