Missing content inside some my Apple Notes, WHY?? Help!

Just got off the phone with Apple Tech support on this issue again. Got on my laptop (2008 version with El Capitan 10.11.6) and same issue as with the missing table inside my protected notes. After a bit of digging & transfer, Apple Support located the issue. Turns out iCloud Notes does not support tables - unless they are the simple ones you create within the Notes app. So, copy and paste of an Excel table won't work. However, my desktop and ios versions do support the tables in Notes (I'm running Mojave 10.14.6 on my Mac Mini, iPhone 8 iOS 13.3) The reason I have the problem on my Desktop and Phone stemmed from the lack of table support in iCloud notes. iCloud rules the data - what is there is what gets syncd. Apparently, on a recent sync down from iCloud, the table data was not transferred, so when I opened the Note on my iPhone that table data was not there - because iCloud didn't include it in the sync, because it doesn't support embedded tables. Oh and I also found out that my old laptop doesn't support the embedded tables in Notes either.

Workaround for me - print the Excel table as a pdf for a Note, as I'm only interested in being able to view. I suppose I could use that native app from iCloud.

Same exact thing.

I lost tables I had created and I also lost some of the pictures I had pasted in the note.

I thought I had mismanaged this somehow until I saw your post. Now I believe something Apple did caused this.

Update - Just tried to put the Excel data into the note as plain text. When I opened up Notes on my MacMini - all of the data and the table were in the note. Not sure what that means. And just double checked - that note has no visible table from either my phone or iCloud (either in Chrome Browser or Safari)

So much for that idea. I created the pdf and a note, dropped the pdf in, no problem. Went to protect the Note - NO DICE. From the Notes dropdown when trying to lock the note. "Notes with video, audio, PDF, or file attachments can’t be locked." No idea how I'm going to do this short of either creating a text note or copy/paste into a Table within Notes.

Found a work around that works for me.

Create the Note

Copy Table data from Excel to the Clipboard

Paste into the Note without formatting - use keystrokes Option+Shift+Command+V

Of course, no cell formatting, but each cell's contents are in a single row of the Note - better than one long string. And at least the data is now text and so Notes can handle the Protection feature.

Same issue and i really hope we can recover the content from the table note...

Update - less than an hour late, I opened up the Note on my MacMini and the table is gone. I suppose it's some syncing issue. Going to try to contact Apple Support

So, you were able to recover files? I would like to do that and move on.

I have the same issue, and while I hate it, I'm glad to see I'm not alone. And it is scary, putting some of my most sensitive data in the protected note and then discovering that it's gone. Not only that but where did it go? Floating around freeform on some Apple Server? - or worse?

Anyway, I haven't seen any fixes or causes from other users so figured I'd info on onto the Community Cloud and hope a solution will appear. In my case, this issue just showed up a few weeks ago. I'd used the protected note for months without any problems. I figured I must have done something stupid like unwittingly deleting the table when I was trying to do something in one of the other protected notes. So, about a week ago I put the table back in the note and it was OK on my iPhone as well as iCloud. Now today, I see it is gone again.

I'm running Mojave 10.14.6 on my Mac Mini, iPhone 8 iOS 13.3. And by the way, I can't upgrade to Catalina yet - I have to find solutions to replace 7 apps that are not available in 64bit versions.

Here was my workflow. All of this was done on my MacMini. The source for the missing tables were password protected Excel files that stored in my Documents folder, which is synced to iCloud. I opened the Excel file, selected the cells in the spreadsheet, right click copied the cells to my Clipboard, opened the Apple Note put my cursor into the note and right click pasted the clipboard. The information transferred as a table into the Note. Pretty straightforward and simple I think. As I noted above, I repeated this about a week ago when I discovered the missing data in the file and all seemed OK. Now, the table is apparently gone from the note.

While I realize Notes is a free app - becoming quite feature rich and tremendously useful, it must protect my data if I'm to rely on it. And understanding the cause as well as the failure mode is very important moving forward - is it Notes?, is it iCloud, is it Sync?, is it my iPhone?, is it my Carrier?, is it my Network? Since I'm posting, I'm including a couple of aside grumps. First, all protected notes open when any one is opened - that may seem convenient, but I believe it carries too much risk. And second, apparently there is no version history for Notes so that precludes looking back in time to discover the prior state of any note.

Thanks for wading through my post.

Hoping for a solution or workaround from Apple or the community.

Update - Contacted Apple iPhone Customer Support. Went through everything confirming all good with the current iOS and that Notes was current. Without resolution through the basic things, the call got transferred to the level of support. They checked a few more things without effect. They asked me to check my Recently Deleted folder - it was gone in all instances phone, iCloud, mac. They were able to get to some other level of storage and discovered "recoverable files" and did some sort of restore. My Recently deleted folder popped up on all my devices and it had the content that I had deleted recently. Then they had me use the Notes "search" to locate my file that had been empty. Notes found the file and when I opened it all data, tables etc was there. I then closed Notes, reopened it and opened my protected Note - all was in place as it should have been. We were unable to conclude if the "fix" was related to the restoration of recoverable files or something to do with opening the file from the "search".

Cause of the missing data and Recently Deleted Folders still unknown. But Apple Support was able to get things put back in order.

And, by the way, while I'm frustrated with the Notes loss of content, I am very thankful for Apple Support. They did a good job. Now, I'm just hoping the cause gets determined and fixed before this happens to me again.