Goodnotes betrayed me.
I've read the complaints online but I never thought it would happen to me. For years I've kept an old, almost single-use iPad with Goodnotes installed, and I would take the majority of my notes by hand with an Apple Pencil. They'd instantly sync to my phone and I'd always have them with me. Any PDFs I wanted to keep would go there as well (for me, this is mostly knitting patterns), and I kept my digital dayplanner in there too. This way I've been able to keep to my preference of writing my notes by hand while having the advantages of the cloud and electronic access.
I've been a very happy customer all this time, but I have known that the subreddit /r/goodnotes is not happy at all. It's now basically a subreddit for complaints about things like their integration of AI, fairly aggressive pricing scheme, and worst of all complaints about data disappearing. Lots of distraught medical students.
Still, I had never had any of these issues and you can't judge everything by online reviews, which tend to attract complaints.
Until this week at work when I went to open up the notebook I use to keep track of proposed legislation that might impact my unit. I will upload a PDF I download from the California Legislature so I can read on my tablet and highlight and underline, and then I insert some pages from a particular template to write out additional notes and analysis for later presentation. My main point is that it was a pretty important document, and I was dumbfounded when I went to open it up ahead of an important meeting and discovered the entire thing had disappeared. I checked my phone too, and went through every folder, but it was like it never existed at all.
It was the notebook I had open when I last used the iPad, so I assume something went wrong during the cloud sync process and it overwrote itself out of existence.
I have so much data in GoodNotes, and I'm so committed to my handwritten notetaking process that it's hard for me to imaging switching at this point. Plus I've been considering upgrading my iPad for years, and even if the new one had enough memory to do other things as well this would continue to be its main purpose!
But losing the notebook was such a fundamental violation of the promise of a notetaking app, which is that you're going to be able to read your notes again when you need them. Fortunately its early into the legislative season this year, and most of it hasn't gone anywhere yet, so I didn't lose a lot, and ultimately this is one notebook out of dozens, and one incident over years of good behavior! But I haven't been able to write anything important in it since, because what's the point if it disappears?
I've been doing a lot of notetaking in Notepad lately though. Sometimes I use Markdown and sometimes I just go for straight text. Each file is so tiny, they're easy to back up, and can be read by so many programs. To keep everything organized I just use file folders, and name the files YYYYMMDD Topic and they will appear in alphabetical order. Maybe low tech is best tech, here?
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