I need advice on how to recover my inspector comments/footnotes!
Yesterday, I synced several documents with Simplenote. I worked only on one of them.
Today, I synced back, and the comments have disappeared!
What to do?
Can I recover the pre-sync state of the affected document somehow? ARGH!
If you had “Take snapshots of affected documents before updating” enabled in the Simplenote Sync, then you should be able to simply rollback to your last snapshot in that document. You could take a snapshot of your current version as well before rolling back, so that if you made changes you can copy them out of that snapshot into the restored version.
If you don’t have a recent snapshot, access your full project backups and grab the most recent from before the sync. Open it side-by-side with the active version of the project and then copy and paste the text from the backup version of the document to the newer missing-comments version. (Normally you might drag and drop the document from the backup, but in this case since only the main text was affected, copy/paste will ensure you don’t break any Scrivener links to that document and should be about as simple to do.) Then you can close the backup version and carry on with the restored copy.
Since you can’t sync inspector comments and footnotes using Simplenote, I suggest making a complete backup of your project after you’ve restored the document and then using the Format > Convert options to change inspector notes to inline on all the documents you’ll be syncing with Simplenote. If you edit a paragraph that contains an inline note, the note will be retained in the plain-text format enclosed in either double round brackets, ((comments)), or double curly, {{footnotes}}.
When you sync changes back to Scrivener, the comments and footnotes will be automatically converted back to true inline notation if you have “Convert text inside (( )) and {{ }} to inline notes when syncing plain text files” enabled in the Import/Export pane of Scrivener > Preferences. Otherwise, you can select them in Scrievner’s editor and manually convert them after syncing.
Thanks so much. It worked!
I could have sworn though that the inspector comments and footnotes synced alright before… or I happened to work on a document without those and just didn’t notice…
Thanks again 
Great, I’m glad you were able to recover everything! Simplenote uses plain-text, so formatting and inspector notes have never been included in the sync. Maybe before you had inline notes?