Exporting 5,575 iCloud notes *off* my iCloud account

[JohnCageFrancis]

Hey there and thanks in advance on this. I've been googling on this and also have tried searching this forum and no real luck.

I have 5K iCloud notes in the notes 'app', and a few different devices sharing the same account, and I think because the notes have images and video within them AND some of my devices are a little old, the notes app can really slow things down.

I want to export a huge iCloud notes library off of iCloud, any searchable file format is fine like pdf, google docs, even txt files would be fine. Even making a seperate iCloud account just to store the notes would be better than keeping them where they are now.

Also, it's my assessment at this point that the notes app is great for keeping under a few hundred reminders and little jot-downs but it just doesn't work well for anything more serious.

Obviously I could export individual notes but it absolutely would not be worth it with this quantity.

Some possibilities I've come across so far:

- some third party apps (tried using them and they were crazy slow or glitchy) - still open to a recommendation for another one
- some things involving tooling around in Finder to get some sort of source file. Even if that's just like a billion lines of text that I paste into a word document, I'll take it as an option.
- some thing involving the iphone backup function via itunes
- more so just a thought: transfer to a different icloud account so I could at least start fresh?

the most beautiful perfect solution here would maintain notes dates and folders and subfolders but I know that might be tricky.

Also fine to purchase a program that will do this even if it's a little steep.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

 

[HDFan]

Evernote allow you to import, but as you have found Apple notes doesn't really support exporting. I tried exporter for Apple Notes. But two problems:

1. Text had markup: <div>Verify Disk (did permissions in error)</div>
2. Sophos home killed the process after the export as it was encrypting something. Treated it as ransomeware. I'm not going to take the chance so I deleted it.

 

[JohnCageFrancis]

Evernote allow you to import, but as you have found Apple notes doesn't really support exporting. I tried exporter for Apple Notes. But two problems:

1. Text had markup: <div>Verify Disk (did permissions in error)</div>
2. Sophos home killed the process after the export as it was encrypting something. Treated it as ransomeware. I'm not going to take the chance so I deleted it.

What a bummer, thank you for the response though.

This is crazy, it just seems like the simplest thing. There's gotta be a way.

I suppose I'll look into whether Evernote can help.

 

[sgtaylor5]

I've ran into this too. There isn't an automatic way, by design. The Apple way is to export each note as a PDF individually. Sucks.