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Why can't Auto Backup back up some documents?

You might at times find that despite a success message, Auto Backup hasn't been uploading certain documents, which can be found by tapping the Auto Backup status icon from the Documents tab and checking the "Excluded Documents" list:

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If you've set the Auto Backup format to PDF, the app is likely having difficulty exporting those documents to PDFs. This typically happens to documents created from large PDFs, e.g. medical texts, or notebooks having a massive number of annotations. Because generating a PDF consumes a lot of memory, the app might not be able to complete it using the limited RAM of your device. If you can't manually export such a document to a PDF, resulting in a crash or a stuck process, you know the document is likely too large for your device to handle.

If tapping those excluded documents to add them back to the Auto Backup queue doesn't help, please change the Auto Backup format to the native GoodNotes format. You can later import those .goodnotes documents to GoodNotes for macOS (which you can redownload for free if you have a Mac) and export them to PDFs as needed. You'll likely succeed because the Mac is much more powerful than your mobile device in computing power and memory. If you don't have a Mac, you can send us those documents and we'll try exporting them to PDFs for you.

To prevent this issue, you might want to:

  • Keep your notebooks small and start new ones often. Don't cram every annotation into a huge notebook.
  • Compress your original large PDFs and use the compressed versions instead to reduce the memory requirement for exporting them to PDFs later.