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Notes disappearing on iPhone!

MrCheeto

MrCheeto

Suspended
Original poster
Nov 2, 2008
3,531
353
I just spent an hour gathering information for work and conveniently saving the information in Notes on my iPhone as I have been doing since I bought it in December.

The other week, though, it just DISAPPEARED! Or so I thought. I later found it in my INBOX when I got home and checked my email on my computer.

THIS TIME it really did disappear! I've NEVER had this happen, but the note just does not exist. I've tried replicating this by just pressing home, or locking it, or quitting Notes. This has ONLY happened since upgrading to iOS 4.

What gives?! I can say I'm very lucky because this is the ONLY issue I've ever had with the iPhone, but it's a major one when I rely upon it for such things.
 
Not sure if this will help you or not but my notes disappeared too,
I clicked on the accounts and it turned out that iPhone 4 and the ios 4 has the iPhone notes and the google notes on my phone so if I click on accounts and iPhone it will only show some of my notes and if I click on the google notes some of them disappear and some of them don't, so I still got to get used to the notes for google and iPhone notes but you might find your notes on the different account under notes just try, let me know if it works
 
try to find it it may be it replicate in the format of other document sometime it happen
 
disappearing notes

I've been having the same problem for the past week and its driving me nuts!
 
This is beyond ridiculous. I'm trying to use notes to keep up with my bank balance since the desktop and mobile versions of BofA suck. I write something down, but when I come back it's gone. Just gone. This is just disappointing that they couldn't get this correct. Never had this problem with my 3G or 3GS.:mad:

Hmmm... just powered the phone on/off and found my notes have miraculously re-appeared.

For those of you having problems, try this and see what happens.

Update 2... it's still doing it... ******** this is...

Update 3... Now I notice when I'm writing a message the little circle of activity appears by the wifi signal icon. Are my notes being sent somewhere without my knowledge? This is weird. As well when I'm pulling up my notes that little circle appears and the phones seem to be loading my notes.
 
this was happening to me too. Restarting my phone seemed to fix it but it happened again.. Only since updating to 4. I noticed to internet dial spinning so I checked my settings and un-synched my 3 email accounts from the notes and also the annoying archive button that has replaced the delete button. Hurray!
 
I'm having the disappearing notes too!
A few days ago I made a nice list of food for my cat, it had about 15-20 items. Today I synced with iTunes to get some music and now half of my notes is just gone! More than that, I type it back in and as soon as I hit "done", I see the little circle of internet activity next to my wifi symbol, and the new part of the list that I just finished typing in literally disappears before my eyes!
What the heck is this?!

And when I go to my settings and turn notes off in my email settings, the whole note goes away! When I turned it back on, the note returned AND it had the item I had added that had been disappering before.
But anything new goes away. I suppose it will again be there if I turn the setting on/off again. But this is sooo frustrating!
 
Notes vaporize from 3Gs OS 4.02

:mad: Not happy camper - in a 3 hour course - hey lets use iPhone notes - this will be great - 2 hours 45 min in course - look down and only the first hour of notes remain - no idea - someone in development and QA needs to be flogged for allowing such an error.
 
Ghost notes

I had same problem with notes vanishing before my very eyes whilst jotting some important work related stuff, only started happening with new iPhone 4. Looked through some settings and found this helped....Go to settings, mail contacts calendars, * under your mail account it will prob say mail- notes, touch your mail account you can then swipe notes and calendar off here. Hope this helps.:rolleyes:
 
Yeah! I notice when I create a note, as soon as I'm done typing it starts using the network (spinning gear) and the text bolds and unbolds as if it's being manipulated by the forces of our beloved lord Kromdar (though we know, in fact, they are).

Can't we just disable the frizznicking syncing?!?!
 
Out of curiosity, are your phones set up to connect sync notes with your email provider(mobileme, hotmail, aol, gmail, yahoo provide note syncing)

Go to settings>Mail, contacts, calendar>(your email account) and check if notes is set to on. Maybe sliding it off will work (but don't take my word for it or blame me if all your notes get deleted)
 
How to recover notes

When synced with a gmail account (set up with IMAP, for that to work) your notes can be found in your gmail by searching for "in:Notes" or "label:Notes". I accidentally removed all labels from my account during a clean-up, but all I had to do was to put the "Notes" label back on all of the latest iterations (there were many) of my notes. I found them all by searching for "from:me".

Also note that you can select messages (or notes, as it were) over several pages of search results, but when applying a label only the ones selected on the current page will be affected (bug?).
 
Dude...

These were saved to the iPhone, not any of my email accounts and they vanished. It was the first and only time that's happened...
 
Notes disappeared from iPhone 4/4s

My Notes were linked to one of my accounts (i.e. gmail, yahoo, iCloud). I went to Settings-Mail, Contacts, Calanders-pick the account that you had it linked to turn it back on. I had turned my off in trying to save battery life. I hope this helps
 
My Notes just all disappeared!

Thanks for this forum I had gone into Settings on my Iphone and turned off notes for my email accounts and low and behold all the notes on my I-Phone disappeared! Turned the sliding switch to on for each email account and all my notes magically re-appeared! Whew! I found them in a folder on my email account but did not know that sliding the switch to off would make them disappear on my phone! Thanks for leading me to the right solution!:)
 
disappearing notes.

I'm having the same problem, but none of you gave a satisfactory answer. My notes show up in my default e-mail account on my mac and disappear from the phone. disturbing when I have a list of things to buy at Lowes, and when I get there the notes are in my laptop back home!!:eek:
 
sailorb said:
I'm having the same problem, but none of you gave a satisfactory answer. My notes show up in my default e-mail account on my mac and disappear from the phone. disturbing when I have a list of things to buy at Lowes, and when I get there the notes are in my laptop back home!!:eek:
Click to expand...

I had this happen on a jailbroke phone. I restored it and it never happened again. No idea why it happened though.
 
Apple Note Plague

I have the :apple: note plague also, It has happened only twice, but recently within the last month. First time it was not associated with an update but likely a sync....:confused:.
Secondly, yesterday when I updated the device! Nooow I really don't know why I did since all seemed to work well. I guess there is an "Inherent Updating Gene in the human genome (IUG), :eek:.
The first time I had months of my passwords of which am constantly forgetting and resetting.:( My forgetfulness I can live with :eek: but my apple device note app is totally unreliable and will not trust it again :(.
Am only posting now as I go-ogled my problem and it has lead me here :). That is the only good part of my story :). My story may now be added to the lost souls of the note app in apple devices!

By The Way."otherwise I love My :apple: Device".:D.Nobody's Perfect Now Are We :p?

Thanks Apple Note Plague I found an interesting web forum!

Regards. DaSon'e

http://dasonesinferno.blogspot.com/
 
Disappearing "Notes"

I keep having the same problem with my iPhone 4S: every week my "Notes" disappear which is a real pain, as I have some important ones on it!

I've tried turning the phone off and then on agin but this doesn't work. It hasn't sent them to iCloud either, as this syncs with my computer and the notes aren't there!

It's high time Apple did something about this ongoing problem with iPhones.
 
Following up

There doesn't seem to have been much activity on this post recently, so I figured I would follow up.

I have an iphone 4s running ios 6.1 I have an 2 email accounts set to sync with notes. A Gmail and a Yahoo account, and my yahoo account is set, in the Notes settings, as the default.

As of Dec. 31 2012, only one note that I have made has stayed on my iphone. the rest were disappearing after I closed the note application, and only after a couple days. Following some suggestions from this post, I check and sure enough, they are all on my yahoo account under notes.

My follow up question is, how can I get these notes back on my iphone and how to stop it from erasing the copy from my phone. I like that it syncs with my email so that I don't lose them, but I want access to them on my phone as well.
 
disappearing iphone notes!

Dankyn said:
My follow up question is, how can I get these notes back on my iphone and how to stop it from erasing the copy from my phone. I like that it syncs with my email so that I don't lose them, but I want access to them on my phone as well.
Click to expand...

I just experienced this same problem an hour ago. GRRRRRR frustrating!!! :mad: Went into my notes app and before it let me click on the one I wanted to write in, it erased 4 other important notes that I write in often.

I too have an iphone 4 running 6.1, and a yahoo mail account. Found all my notes saved under the "notes" folder in my yahoo mail. This folder will only show up when looking at email on my computer, not my phone. I don't know how to stop the phone from erasing notes on itself (it's only done this once to me) But I got the missing notes back onto my phone by opening the missing ones on the computer, then forwarding them to myself (IE type your own email address in the TO: box) From there I was able to open up my mail on my phone, and copy/paste the missing notes back into the notes app.

What a stupid bug this is! I love my Mac and iphone, but I'd be lying if I said they never caused me any stress. Still not as much stress as Microsoft Windoze though. Never again!
 
Last edited:
Sometimes, this really happen to iPhones that are jailbroken then goes back to normal after going back to the normal OS.
 
Dankyn said:
As of Dec. 31 2012, only one note that I have made has stayed on my iphone. the rest were disappearing after I closed the note application, and only after a couple days. Following some suggestions from this post, I check and sure enough, they are all on my yahoo account under notes.
Click to expand...

It seems to me that that only notes which are synced to an email account (i.e. a non iCloud account) tend to disappear. Stupid questions but could that be because of your iPhone is not being connected to the Internet. Note that I understand that even if you are offline Notes should still linger on your iPhone (this is at least the case with iCloud-synced notes).
 
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