Troubleshooting

Solutions to common issues and maintenance tools.

🔧 Storage Repair — Fix duplicate notes and data issues

If duplicate notes or data inconsistencies occur, you can repair storage from the settings.

How to Repair

  1. Open ⚙ Settings → Troubleshooting tab → Repair Storage
  2. Click the "Scan" button
  3. If issues are found, select notes to delete and repair

What Gets Detected

  • Duplicate notes Notes with the same title exist in multiple folders
  • Ghost notes Notes in storage but not visible in UI (rare, caused by interrupted Git sync)
📊 Storage Analysis — Check usage and organize notes

Check storage usage and organize old notes in bulk.

How to Analyze

  1. Open ⚙ Settings → Troubleshooting tab → Storage Analysis
  2. Click the "Analyze" button

What's Displayed

  • Notes by folder Number of notes and percentage per folder
  • Top 10 largest notes With checkboxes for bulk archive
  • Stale notes Notes not updated for 90+ days

Bulk Archive

Select notes and move them to Archive folder in bulk with pinning. Useful for regular backups and storage cleanup.

System Notes are excluded from analysis (auto-generated guide files).

📋 Duplicate Detection — Side-by-side comparison

If notes with the same title are detected, a warning banner is displayed.

  • Warning banner Appears when duplicate notes are detected
  • Side-by-side comparison Click to open comparison modal
  • Choose to keep Select which note to keep, delete the other
⚠️ Before Uninstalling — Back up your data first!

Uninstalling the extension will delete all saved notes.

Mark It Down data is stored in chrome.storage.local, and uninstalling the extension will delete the data.

Backup Methods

  1. Export all notes as ZIP — Settings (⚙) → "Export all notes as ZIP"
  2. Push to GitHub — Git ▼ → Sync (or Git Settings → Push)

We recommend regular exports to avoid losing important notes.

🔔 RSS Notifications Not Appearing

If you've enabled desktop notifications in RSS settings but aren't seeing them, check the following in order:

Checklist

  1. Scheduled refresh also enabled? — Notifications are sent by background polling. Make sure RSS settings > Scheduled refresh is also turned on, not just notifications.
  2. Chrome notification permission — Open chrome://settings/content/notifications and confirm the extension is not blocked.
  3. OS notification settings — On Windows, check System > Notifications > Chrome. On macOS, check System Settings > Notifications > Google Chrome. Make sure Chrome notifications are allowed.
  4. Feed has new items? — Notifications only appear when a fetch finds articles newer than the last check. Try adding a feed that updates frequently to confirm the flow works.
⏱️ Background RSS Fetch Not Running

If feeds aren't updating automatically even with scheduled refresh enabled:

Checklist

  1. Is Chrome running? — Background polling requires Chrome to be open. It does not run while Chrome is fully closed.
  2. Check alarm registration — Open the extension's background service worker in chrome://extensions (click "Service Worker" link) and look for alarm-related log entries. If the service worker is inactive, opening any Mark It Down tab will wake it up and re-register the alarm.
  3. Re-toggle the setting — Turn scheduled refresh off and back on in RSS settings to force alarm re-registration.
  4. Host permissions granted? — Background fetch requires host permissions for each registered feed origin. The extension icon badge shows a count if permissions are missing. Click the badge or open RSS settings to grant them.

Still need help?

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