(edit: not a sync bug!) Note duplication

Bear feedback Bear Bug Report
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  • Bear Version: 2.6.3 (13844) on macOS, 2.6.3 on iOS
  • OS Version: 15.6.1 (24G90)
  • What were you doing: Edited a note on desktop, then edited it on mobile. Not at the same time.
  • What feature did you use:
  • What happened: I later noticed two copies of the note on my phone. I’m not sure if I saw two copies on my desktop (might have).
  • What did you expect to happen: No duplication – syncing.

Bear is installed on my Mac and iPhone, and I edit on both (though not at the same time). The bug is that a duplicate copy of a note sometimes appears. I think I’ve noticed this on my phone, and am not sure I’ve ever noticed it happening on desktop first (though I may have).

I’ve seen this bug happen a number of times over the past few months. It worries me because it seemed like sometimes edits go into one copy, and other edits go into the other copy, and then I need to manually reconcile them.

This sort of bug worries me a great deal because it’s adjacent to data loss. I hadn’t reported it earlier because I didn’t have a good set of instructions to reproduce it, but now that it’s happening again (and more than five times in the past 3 months), with multiple notes I figured I would report it in case this is enough info to investigate/debug.

The note that I was editing contains a list.

IMG_9550
IMG_95501179×730 95.3 KB

The other note on which I remember this happening also contained a (much larger) list. But it might just be that I tend to edit lists more often on my phone.

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The notes reporting the diverging icon in the bottom half of the note list are conflicted notes.
We are working on avoiding these, but the current state of Bear is sometimes not able to understand how to merge the modification of the same note, and to avoid data loss, it generates two versions of the same note.
In this scenario, you can check the content of both notes and decide to eliminate one of them and/or copy part of the content from one into the other.

1 Like
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Oh, fascinating. I missed the “conflicted” icon and didn’t realize since this happened since at the time I expected both devices to have full internet connectivity.

Thanks for the link to the docs, that’s a very useful feature.