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Apple Acknowledges iCloud Notes Disappearing and Explains How to Fix

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Earlier this month, we reported about some iPhone users temporarily losing all of their notes in the Notes app after accepting Apple's updated iCloud terms and conditions. Apple has now indirectly acknowledged this issue in a new support document that outlines steps to follow if your iCloud notes are not appearing on your iPhone, iPad, or Vision Pro.

iCloud-General-Feature.jpg

Fortunately, the notes can be re-synced from iCloud. Apple's steps are pretty much identical to the ones we shared earlier this month:
If your iCloud notes aren't appearing on your iPhone, iPad, or Apple Vision Pro, follow these steps.

1. Open the Settings app and tap your name.
2. Tap iCloud, then tap Notes.
3. Make sure Sync this [device] is on, then check the Notes app.
4. If you still don't see your notes, restart your iPhone, iPad, or Apple Vision Pro. After restarting, check your settings again.

After these steps, your iCloud notes should appear and start syncing again on devices signed in to the same Apple Account. When syncing completes, content previously synced to iCloud should appear.
Click to expand...
Apple updated its iCloud terms and conditions with some minor changes in September, and it has been notifying users about accepting them in recent weeks. The issue with notes disappearing has continued to affect iPhone users since our initial coverage of it earlier this month, according to social media posts.

Notes disappearing has not been the only problem. In another new support document, Apple said iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro users who receive a "Cannot Complete Action" error message when trying to accept the updated iCloud terms and conditions should update to the latest version of iOS, iPadOS, or visionOS and try again.

Article Link: Apple Acknowledges iCloud Notes Disappearing and Explains How to Fix
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/11/16/apple-icloud-notes-support-document/
GerritV said:
Couldn't agree more. None of their cloud services ever worked decently. I remember MobileMe (a yearly subscription BTW), which was so bad that Apple refunded its users and gave them a whole year of free "service".
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Agreed.
ellpee said:
Apple needs to get out of the cloud business BEFORE a major disaster occurs.
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Well I know one disaster that occured in icloud. Its in ios 18 in the icloud storage. The number isnt collorbrating correctly. For example it shows my icloud storage is 150 mb when it should say 50mb.....its very odd. Needs to be fixed but Im sure it wont be. At least not for a yr or more because thats how apple does things they never acknowleges serious bugs until a yr or 2 later.
 
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mortenb said:
With more and more important data in the Notes app, Apple really need to create a better way to make a local backup.
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Agreed. I just tested the iCloud download your data page for Notes.

It took five days to complete the request to make my 50MB Notes zip file.

All the notes are plaintext. At least it included attachments.

They really need to do a better job with this. Pretty sure that backup only exists because they're required to provide users access to their data, but they never said it had to be in a useful format.
 
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I was trying to access a note I did in notes yesterday, throught the web browser as I was out and didn't have my iPad with me. It wasn't in my list of notes.

I thought I was going mad and had to check through Samsung Notes and One note to see if I had actually done the note there. When I got home, sure enough there it was in notes on my iPad, and it's now appeared on iCloud.

This doesn't inspire me with faith to migrate my notes over to Apple...
 
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Do Time Machine backups on the Mac provide any way to recover Notes? I feel pretty decent about my ability to recover from failures with Photos and iCloud Drive, but I wonder about Notes, as the database doesn't seem very accessible...
 
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Passwords is also a problem.

On my M2 MBA Mac, passwords my mother’s shared with my sister and me have disappeared including the shared folders.

Yet on my Mac those shared folders in my and my sister’s Apple account are present and correctly populated. Same for our iPhones.

Turning off the password sync and then restarting the Mac and turning on sync doesn’t recover them.

Given we use the notes section in Passwords to store all account related info, this lack of robustness is unnerving.
 
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My Mom freaked out last week as this happened to her. She keeps hundreds of notes. And they all vanished. Luckliy, a simple system update to newest system, then resyncing in the notes app from icloud….did the trick. Everything was still there.
 
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