Question

I'm having trouble getting a response from Notion support that makes sense.

I created a collection of pages in my MAIN Notion account ( paid account ). It has many pages and a lot of relations. I shared this collection of pages with my BACKUP Notion account ( free account ). So, I have the "master" collection in my paid account, and have shared that collection with my free account.

Everything in the MAIN account was working great until Thursday, January 11, 2024. That's when the relations in my MAIN account stopped working properly. They will no longer bring up a selection of related pages, as an example. It seems to populate one or two possible selections, but not all of the selections. Or, it will not populate anything and offer the option of creating a new page. However, the page already exists in the related table.

Now, let's go to my BACKUP ( free ) Notion account. The shared instance of these pages all work perfectly! If I'm working from the BACKUP ( free ) account on that shared collection of pages, all of the relations work perfectly! Any updates made are reflected correctly back in the MAIN account.

Any ideas why the MAIN account is non-functional but the BACKUP account is working flawlessly? This is very frustrating and just reared it's ugly head last Thursday.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

First of all, I've to say I'm curious as to why you've 2 accounts for your use-case.

That being said, relations don't work across multiple workspace/ Notion accounts unless both accounts have access to the same database.

For example, I've:
Account 1
Account 2

Database 1 - Shared with Account 1 & 2
Database 2 - Shared only Account 1

In this scenario, Account 2 will not be able to see/ update anything inside Database 2 since it doesn't have access.

I've a feeling your use-case might be a bit different but I'll need to understand what you're trying to achieve to better help you.

Answer 2

OK, Notion has no answer. The ORIGINAL paid account that was working perfectly with all of the relations ( for 3 years ) simply stopped working. They don't know why. No relations would work. Referred to their Engineering team 1 week ago. Crickets.

In the meantime, I created a NEW paid account. Shared the ORIGINAL account workspace to the NEW account. Duplicated the collection of pages to the NEW account. Everything works perfectly.

You tell me. This is an account level, behind the scenes issue. I'm still going to use Notion, but I have significant concerns at this point. I'm going to be very cautious and see how things go.

So, in summary:

1. ORIGINAL PAID account - all relations stopped working 2 weeks ago for no reason.
2. Notion Support - 2 weeks and no resolution. Workspace unusable. Major issue.
3. Setup NEW PAID account. Shared ORIGINAL account workspace with NEW account.
4. Duplicated the workspace from ORIGINAL to NEW from the shared workspace.
5. After duplicating to NEW account, everything works perfectly.
6. ORIGINAL account - still, nothing works.
7. Try every browser, 2 different versions of Windows on 2 different computers - Windows app, Web, etc. ORIGINAL account will not work.

Buyer beware. Make frequent backups. I'm waiting for the backup service that can actually also RESTORE completely. Doesn't seem like it exists yet - in beta on a couple of site.