Notes not syncing or uploading to iCloud After iOS 13 Update

On Evernote: as soon as I open the app on two or more devices, it blocks access to all of them and wants me to take a paid upgrade to access my notes on all my devices, unless I log out on all but one.

And there is a lot of suggested news items and advertising going on.

And the there is the problem of migrating, and lack of integration.

I am no longer a fan.

I found that apps also will not update in the App Store. They just stall on both iPad and iPhoneX with iOS 13.2. Likewise Notes synching issues as discussed. I simply restarted both devices and it works again. I’ve had to restart my iPhone twice in the past few days to correct the issue. Not sure why this works of for how long, but I hope they fix this ASAP!!

Sent my feedback. Now I tried to remove my over 1300 notes from iCloud and... Nope. Some folders are empty but can't be eliminated and the web interface crashes... Tried to Sync a small bunch of 36 notes and only 19 notes have synced on the cloud. Useless. Adios Notes Hello Notability!

BTW I'm not migrating 1300 notes from Notes, I'll keep them as archives in Notes and will migrate as PDF only the relevant ones to Notability. The rest stay put on my device or on iCloud when Apple will fix their faulty syncing. Bought Notability a few years back and for an Apple pencil user it is one of the best choice with multi-platform apps. Good luck!

Huge caveat here. I have just followed this advice - except I only followed part of it - and I have lost all of my notes. Every single one. They're permanently deleted and not recoverable. Earthquakes are disasters so, I won't go that far, but this will seriously inconvenience my life. All because I missed the first instruction: Turn off iCloud on all devices. Please don't make the same mistake! BTW, I don't know if this advice works ...

Guys, I posted vigorously at the onset of this issue earlier and ever since followed this thread very closely, trying to find bits and pieces of information which could help me get my workflow back on track. Thus far it looks like the note syncing issue is here to stay... for a while.

After tinkering with console and closely watching the errors that occur, I came up with a plan. And yes, it's a sub-optimal solution. Not even a solution, but a very crude band-aid.

Here is a quick gist: note sync fails on some attachments and some sort of timeout kicks in, after which sync fails again and this process perpetuates itself. If you removed suspect notes from the icloud account, sync would resume. So the idea is to move all notes to a local account on mac, clear all notes from icloud and manually reintroduce handful of critically important notes back into icloud, but make sure these important notes don't have any attachments -- just text.

I decided to keep just 6 most important notes in icloud and have no attachments in them. 5 days in and things have been working ok thus far.

Inconvenient? Yes. I now have to guard my laptop as a praised possession for a while as it has all my notes. Once the problem is fixed by apple, I'll return my locally stored notes from my mac to icloud.

Yes this worked for me, amen! I opened the reminders app on my new Mac, and instantly started getting synced Notes notifications. They started updating, even before I updated the Reminders app. Such a relief. Appreciate the help, thanks so much! Hope others give your suggestion a try.

pg2001’s response on 31st October at 6:12pm worked for me and my partner. We both have iPhone 7s, iPadAir2s and Windows 10pcs. We aren’t very knowledgeable when dealing with tech problems, and more often than not blame our own ineptitude rather than any software or hardware problem. But the sudden failure of synchronisation of notes on our normally reliable Apple devices coincident with updating to iOS13.1 and continuing with 13.2 seemed to be too much of a coincidence. Apple support were their usual courteous selves - but couldn’t deliver a solution.

pg2001’s confident opening assertion “I have resolved the issue” and clear direction was easy for us non techies to follow, and translation for Windows users no problem not too tricky.

Speed and reliability of synchronisation has now returned to normal. We both found a few hundred kB in use even after removing all iCloud notes, and following pg’s direction got rid of the trash, and we’re now back to our normal synchronous selves.

From notes, I simply went to "Notes" - "Accounts". In the iCloud internet account I un-checked notes and reminders. Save and quit Notes app. Open back up and re-check notes and reminders. Both apps synced immediately.

This does not fully work. Certain notes are getting hung up on the sync.. hard to tell whether it’s a locked note or a certain graphic or handwritten, but something makes it hang. If you had all text notes you are probably good.. but if you use handwriting photos and videos this may not work. I even tried ONE note at a time and the wrong single note would hang.

Think Apple needs to fix this but doubt they will. Seems like a good business opportunity for someone to do a better functioning version of this app.

Regarding cleanup and syncing notes with attachments: would a link in a text be considered an attachment? If not, then that means there is a way out by not using graphics of any kind. Seems a shame, but maybe notes with images is just a bit much for now. Until this is solved, I will try the workaround of keeping those tricky notes (and locked ones) on my Mac only.

Just a follow up .. clearing everything out DID end up working for me. The reason the sync was stuck originally was due to an internet problem. Late a night Spectrum’s upload speeds drop to near zero. During the day when speeds were back every worked well and quickly

Thank you so so so so much. This resolved my issue as mine had stoped syncing. I lost quite abit of data too.

3 calls to apple support didn't fix this, and in the end I did these steps and it worked. I couldn't wait for 'engineering to investigate' as I expect a fix wouldn't make it for a while, plus I feared there was corrupted data from the upgrade.

Thank you thank you thank you

Just a quick follow up from my post earlier — All devices finally synchronized fully, so while these workarounds might eventually work, I am still paranoid and don't trust my notes to be up to date everywhere all of the time, an integral aspect of iCloud's value.

I would, however, certainly trust it again — as if it never happened — if Apple fixed the problem and acknowledged it in the release notes.

so what I have discovered is: Notes entered on iphone are syncing to MacBook. If Notes are deleted from iCloud in settings on iphone, after restarting Notes, all notes in iCloud from Macbook are synced until the first change is made on the MacBook. The Notes App on the iphone then stops syncing. The only way round at present is to keep deleting Notes from the iphone to get updated data from the MacBook or other device .

THANKS APPLE for all your support.