PSA: Kindle Scribe Bug is Deleting Notebooks

[tinycrabman6]

Imagine my surprise this morning when I noticed that a notebook containing 7 pages of irreplaceable notes just up and vanished from my Scribe. And turns out I am not the only one. Yikes.

While I don't know what lead to produce this issue, Scribe users on the subsequent links are speculating it may be related to leaving the device on airplane mode and/or a whispersync related bug. I personally lost my 7 pages of notes while on airplane mode and with the default whispersync settings.

Be warned not to write any mission critical notes, the fact that at least 10+ have reported this issue online seems to suggest this is a software bug, and not some accidental user-initiated deletion.

Reddit links on the issue:

Lost pages of a notebook

Kindle Scribe auto delete notes

Kindle Scribe notes/annotations disappearing

Scribe is missing pages from notes after a restart

Amazonforum links:

Has anyone else lost notebooks on their Kindle Scribe?

Lost a Notebook on My Kindle Scribe

Notes disappearing

Losing pages in Kindle Scribe notebook

NoteBook Pages lost

[Jeffrey.]

I ran into this once. It has to do with the way notebooks sync with Amazon. I factory reset my device, and now my Scribe is offline only with WhisperSync disabled. I get my notebook pages in high resolution .png images from the hidden thumbnails folder via USB. There's no ridiculous watermark that way. Amazon doesn't get the opportunity to see or lose my data. I'm waiting for a jailbreak. I might create a Calibre plugin that will automatically download the notebook thumbnails, but it's super easy to do manually.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by Jeffrey.

I ran into this once. It has to do with the way notebooks sync with Amazon. I factory reset my device, and now my Scribe is offline only with WhisperSync disabled. I get my notebook pages in high resolution .png images from the hidden thumbnails folder via USB. There's no ridiculous watermark that way. Amazon doesn't get the opportunity to see or lose my data. I'm waiting for a jailbreak. I might create a Calibre plugin that will automatically download the notebook thumbnails, but it's super easy to do manually.

If you don't grab your notebook pages via USB, it will be in lower resolution and with watermark? That sounds a little bit stupid. If you factory reset the device and didn't give it access to the internet, Amazon doesn't know you deregistered the device, so the issue of deleted notepads due to attempted and failed sync doesn't happen anymore? Since you don't have it connected to the net anymore, can you get marked up KFX files (PDF converted to print replica) off the device?

[tomsem]

I have not seen these problems, but I never turn off WiFi, so things get backed up to cloud. I have only about a dozen notebooks at the moment, only 5 are Downloaded. My investment in this feature is low at this point, and so is my concern.

I won't opine about how serious this is, at least not without reading more of the reports.

I see the .notebooks folder also has a number of GUID-labelled folders with a couple of 'journal' files in them. I am curious to learn what their purpose is. I'm guessing they log editing sessions, maybe even deltas between these.

If I start doing more serious things with notebooks, I will probably use Share feature with those so I don't risk losing something important.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Jeffrey.

I ran into this once. It has to do with the way notebooks sync with Amazon. I factory reset my device, and now my Scribe is offline only with WhisperSync disabled. I get my notebook pages in high resolution .png images from the hidden thumbnails folder via USB. There's no ridiculous watermark that way. Amazon doesn't get the opportunity to see or lose my data. I'm waiting for a jailbreak. I might create a Calibre plugin that will automatically download the notebook thumbnails, but it's super easy to do manually.

What watermark?

[Jeffrey.]

Originally Posted by tomsem

What watermark?

The one that says Kindle in blue on notebook PDFs you export through Amazon.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Jeffrey.

The one that says Kindle in blue on notebook PDFs you export through Amazon.

I am not seeing this.

[tinycrabman6]

Update: After investigating the device files, it appears you can recover notebooks (not note pages) which are deleted in the `.notebooks` folder. If you copy the notebook-id folder and overwrite it to an empty one, it will still read the SQLite file and it will display correctly, but you can’t export it anymore for whatever reason. With that in mind, if individual pages were deleted due to whispersync, then recovering it from the file system is no dice since they are overwritten when synced to the internet.

Also a sidenote: I tried reaching out to Amazon through the chat feature, and their customer support was atrocious. I was transferred to about 7 different reps and none of them understood the problem was related to notebooks and not eBooks. Eventually they forwarded it to the cis(at)amazon.com support team, sent a generic response, “expect to get a reply in 6 hours”, and then never bothered to reply after 5 days. Also don’t follow their generic troubleshooting to deregister your device, doing so deletes all local notebooks, and since they don’t get synced to the cloud properly, the affected notebooks are gone forever.

[Quoth]

Amazon Kindle Customer service seems only any use to sometimes remove adverts. But they wouldn't do it for 3 year old PW3 that had been my wife's and was now on my account.
https://xkcd.com/806/

I recently had someone ask me to go get a computer and turn it on so I could restart it. He refused to move further in the script until I said I had done that.

And if there is no appropriate comment in XKCD, then it's in "The Princess Bride"
Masks, by Dread Pirate Roberts / Wesley:

Some day everyone will be wearing them

[tinycrabman6]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Amazon Kindle Customer service seems only any use to sometimes remove adverts. But they wouldn't do it for 3 year old PW3 that had been my wife's and was now on my account.
https://xkcd.com/806/


And if there is no appropriate comment in XKCD, then it's in "The Princess Bride"
Masks, by Dread Pirate Roberts / Wesley:

Haha... always a relevant XKCD, thanks for the laugh

[ninettegoucher]

Would you mind providing more information on how to restore a deleted notebook. I sent the notebook to my email, and have never had an issue retrieving them in my inbox, then I deleted the notebook. A few minutes later I got an email that the notebook failed to send. Now I'm just sick, because I can't get back the notebook. Appreciate your help.