Disappearing iPad note markups

I've had the same issue two separate times while editing documents with the Markup feature on my iPad. While I was trying to zoom in or out, the document just went berserk for second, and afterwards ALL MY EDITS WERE GONE! Very very very frustrating!!

What I finally figured out today is that there is no way of getting your edits back, UNLESS you:

A: Place your document on the cloud (so you can later open it on your desktop)

B: Save it every stopping point you have (as often as possible).

C: When you eventually lose your current edits, leave the document open for a few minutes just in case the edits re-populate (the first half of my edits came back in one of the incidents).

D: Once you figure out that not all your edits will repopulate, open your document on your desktop.

E: Once on the desktop, got to File->Revert to -> Browse All Versions and restore to the last one that hopefully has 90% of your edits (because you followed step B).

Hopefully this helps. A little.

PS. If you didn't save your edits occasionally, but you worked on your document off and on for hours or days, your device might have random versions saved for you.

I am a professora at university and have been using the iPad to grade the scanned exams, thus avoiding covid. It started to get very, very frustrating when all the annotations vanished.

I am using an iPad Pro 2018, updated to the latest iOS, I open the pdf in files, so with preview, and annotate with the Apple Pencil.

I started closing and openning the pdf more often, but the problem still crept in destroying my work. I then noticed in a large file with already some annotations that when closing the file with the Apple Pencil a pop up saying “saving” popped at the same place and the Apple Pencil would click again and cancel the save! I think this explains it!

My workaround had been to, with the pdf open, turn on and off the annotations, since it also saves the image and apparently does not re-trigger a cancel. An to close the pdf now I always use my finger and to the Apple Pencil.

This reduced drastically the issue, but I must say it still happened the other day, but it might be some distraction on my side.

I hope this can help you all, but it is a real shame on Apple for not addressing this head on!

All the best!

To be clear:

what I discovered: after using the Apple Pencil to annotate/markup, when closing the file it started to save but the save was canceled, I think due to a repeat click by the pencil, and the file is closed without saving the annotations.

my solution: with the pdf open, after each small annotation/markup click on and off on the icon that shows the pencil options and colours, forcing iPad to save the update. I now also close the file with my finger and not the Apple Pencil.

In morte details, I am using preview and not notes nor pages, i.e., when I click on a pdf file in Files preview opens the file. On the top right side there is an icon I can use to have type pencil annotation float menu with tip type, color, etc. When I hit click this annotate and click again it says “saving image” (perhaps only visible with large files). Doing this after each iteration, as if going for ink with an ancient ink tip pen, has proved a safe way to lock my annotations. I only close the pdf file after “cycling” the annotation icon, since I discovered that my repetitive losses were due to inadvertently canceling the save that is done when you close the file due to a reaper at click by the Apple Pencil or my finger.

I hope this works for you, and you can share as helpful for others.

I think many of you complaining here, in this posting, need to switch to a more reliable, paid, third party app.

Forget the free Apple iOS/iPadOS Notes app!

I am a 12 year iPad users and that default, free Apple iOS/iPadOS Notes apps has NEVER been reliable for me to use as primary notes/pdf/document edotong app, ever!

You cannot paginate in the basic, free, default Apple iOS Notes app.

Notes created in the basic, barebones Notes app are one long, continuous note.

It has always been this way.

The default iOS Notes app is free and is of very limited features/functionalities.

If you really want to get the most out of that Apple Pencil and need extra note-taking features, I recommend looking at other paid, third party note taking apps.

Apple's free, default, iOS Notes app a a basic notes apps that Apple includes, more or less, as a example “showcase” app of what could be done when designing/coding a more fully featured note-taking app.

Apple's free Notes app is NOT a full featured notes app and has many useful features not available to it.

Apple has always treated their iOS Notes app in a way where the app is like only approx. 80% “there”.

To make the free iOS Notes app a relatively basic, simple notes app that anyone can, more or less, learn fairly easily, Apple's Notes has eschewed many useful features found in other more powerful and robust/feature-rich, third party note taking apps.

Also, to also emphasize how basic the free iOS Notes app is, Apple ONLY upgrades/updates this app once a year with a new iOS/iPadOS version introduction every September/October.

Forget the free Apple Notes apps. I has been a constant source of frustrations and headaches to many users over its long history.

Apple just can't seem to get their free Notes app to work with any long-term trust/reliability

If you need more features from a notes/note taking app, I recommend you look to the Apple iOS App Store for more fully featured, third party apps that get many regular updates throughout the years!

Here is an incomplete list of much better notes/note taking apps you may wish/want to look at that are more robust and feature-rich, in no particular order.

INKredible

Liquid Text

Margin Note 3

Microsoft One note

Nebo

Notability

Notepad+/Notrpad+ Pro

NoteShelf 2

Notes Plus

Notes Writer/(Pro)

Notebook

Good Notes 5

Zoom Notes

Quick Notes X Pro

PDF Pro

Lots more paid choices than this. Look for PDF editors, as well.

The basic Apple Notes app has NEVER been up to the challenge of a powerful, note-taking app and/or a PDF/document editor.

Never!

You all need to stop wasting your time with the free Apple Notes app!

It is simply NOT worth all of its frustrations and aggravations.

Best of Luck to ALL of You!

This disappearing notes issue has been a long, LONG-STANDING issue, with also some other long-standing issues, with the free and barebones features Apple Notes app.

I am convinced that this issue is not directly related to editing notes, thr Files app and/or using the Apple Pencil.

This disappearing notes issue can be traced back all the way to around the time of iOS 9 and 10!

There was NO issues with notes randomly disappearing before iOS 9 and 10 arrived and this has remained an issue ever since!

So much so, that I pretty much stopped using the Apple Notes app for ANY important notes keeping soon after I had two or three times where a significant amount of my important notes kept randomly disappearing and when sync'd with iCloud with all of my other iOS devices, those notes disappeared from iCloud and all my other iOS devices, as well.

My wife had run into the same issue,,but does not ever want to pay for apps, so she actually went back to handwriting notes with pen and paper notebooks.

I have been DONE with the free Apple iOS Notes app for nearly 6 years, now and have NEVER gone back to it.

Apple's free Notes app is a basic, barbones app that ONLY gets major changes/rework once a year with every new iOS/iPadOS iteration.

It is not a very good OR very robust notes app and I will just continue to advise everyone here to just STOP using it!

Save yourself the headache and heartache ( when your hard work creating lengthy notes that just randomly disappear without any hope of retrieval of these randomly disappearing notes ).

This is Apple's equivalent of its macOS Text or Simple Text app, which is also free, but has LOTS of limitations. too!

Most third party notes apps get steady and regular app updates to fix found/known bugs.

Most legitimate thrird party apps and note taking apps, in partcular, do NOT “mine” your data.

Most third party notes apps are more robust, more stable and just work better than Apple's free iOS Notes app!

Lots of Apple Pencil compatible third party apps to choose from.

Here is a long, but incomplete list of Apple Pencil compatible notes apps.

Pages

Bear

Collanote ( free )

Documents

EverNote

Inkredible

iAnnotate 4

Good Notes 5

Goodreader 4

Liquid Text

Margin Note 3

Microsoft One note

Nebo

Notability

Notepad+

NoteShelf 2

Notes plus

Notes Writer/(Pro)

Notebook ( free )

PenBook

QuickNotes X/ Pro

uPad

Write pad

Whink notes

Zoom Notes

PDF Expert

PDF Pro

Foxit PDF

Again, an incomplete list. There maybe more Apple Pencil compatible notes apps that I have not compiled.

Good Luck to You and to All Others Here.

Find another app, it doesn't necessarily has/needs to be free!

Find an app that works!

There are plenty of paid notes apps that can hamdle many document/text formats.

LOTS of paid PDF apps!

Just find something that works and use it!

Examples of what I have on my iPad and I usem on a regular basis.

None are free, but ALL work as text and PDF editors and a few can even import some drawing/image formats.

Notability

Good Notes

Noteshelf

Goodreader

PDF Pro

PDF Expert

Many more options than this! MANY.

Y’all need to get away from just using free Apple apps!

There are apps/tools out there that CAN do the job you all need to do that get a LOT more regular, steady updates than Apple's own free apps, which ONLY,musually, get one major upgrade/update a year!

When a new iOS/iPadOS gets introduced/released.

Y’all need to just stop this insanity and find other third party apps that just wotk and do the job that all of you here are trying to accomplish.

Do some of your own research and search the iOS App Store, already!

I don’t know if this will help anyone, but I now import any pdf docs I want to mark up into the GoodNotes app. I realise this means having to buy another app when Apple should sort the problem out, but GoodNotes gives me the flexibility to import and markup pdf’s, add extra pages for notes and is generally a first class app for making notebooks for different subject areas. I used it extensively when studying at uni, and so far (touch wood) all my notebooks and marked up docs are intact. It was a game changer for me and the £6 ish purchase price for unlimited notebooks (you can try it free with up to 3 notebooks), is a no brainier when it comes to your sanity.

If EVERYONE here keeps on insisting on using the Apple Notes apps to edit PDFs and dicuments, that is really an unsuitable app for ANY real,,serious note taking and document editing purposes, everyone that posts here is going to get burned, at some point, every single time!

I have LONG since given up on using the free Apple Notes app for ANY important note takng or document editing.

The Notes app ONLY get new features once a year and trust, reliability of this app has always remained and issue/problem.

Find a good, reliable third party app ( if it is a paid app, so be it ) to do ANY serious work!

A new free note/document/PDF app to look at? Collanote.

Tap the link below.

Collanote

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/collanote-note-journal-pdf/id1540956268

Use a notes/document/PDF creation and editing app that is reliable and suitable for purpose, already!

The markup feature is a part of the Apple Notes apps, regardless of how it is accessed to edit notes, documents, PDFs.

The Notes app has NEVER, EVER been a very good app. Free, or not.

Find anoher third party app that is suitable for purpose and just STOP playing around with editing of notes/documents/pdfs using the Files app preview markup mode!

Just open the note/document/PDF in a reliable third party app and edit these text files from DIRECTLY within the third party app!

Enough with this insanity, already!

Same happened to me. I downloaded the free PDF Viewer and have used it for several months with no problems. It is beyond RIDICULOUS that Apple doesn’t have this figured out. Over 25,000 views of this thread!! Try PDF Viewer. (I’m a professional musician and have no affiliation or connection whatsoever to PDF Viewer.)

Hi everyone--I posted here a few days ago. I downloaded Microsoft's OneNote app and it works really, really well. I'm not sure if this is a paid service because I have it through my school, but I would definitely recommend that you use this until Apple gets it together. It syncs with your wifi, so it's continuously saving your document. <3

Folks,

The solutuon is to use another app and work within the actual app with the actual PDF/documents file stored on your device. and within the app to edit.

STOP trying to edit documents/PDFs from a cloud source location.

STOP trying the edit documents from the Files app!

There are plenty of workarounds for this issue you all simply choose to ignore.

Apple has NOT addresed this issue for quite awhile, now.

You all need to use altenative methods to do your document/PDF creation/editing work until Apple gets this sorted, or not.

I have time and time, again here, told everyone to find alternative apps to using Apple's Notes app and markup feature, within the Apple Notes app.

Apple Notes app maybe free, but is of limited and, many times, flawed functionality.

Just end all of this insanity, already, and find another third app and procedures/features that just work!

I gave a reply/posting of an incomplete list of possible third party apps with MANY more than what I listed.

The Apple Notes app, and the function of the Markup tools feature within the Apple Notes app, ONLY gets upgrades/updates once a year, with every new introduction of iOS/iPadOS,in the Fall, and that is, usually, it for any more Notes app upgrades/updates.

The Apple Notes app has always been a barebones, somewhat basic note taking app with limited featues and with features added that have been long part of other, more popular, third party notes style apps.

Almost all third party apps get updates on a far more regular/frequenr basis and third party app developers actually listen their app users/customers.

Forget the Apple Notes apps and its faulty/flawed markup tools feature.

Find much better third party PDF/notes/document taking/editing apps that will actually work and will NOT delete your work without warning or cause.

The only way I've been able to work around this problem (after losing hours worth of notes) is by using the OneDrive app to store and annotate my documents. I found that the annotations on Apple's mark-up save as a layer. The annotations are still there when they "disappear" but they get pushed to the back of the document, behind the PDF. So you can't see them and there is no way, as far as I know, to bring them back. Please, developers, fix this problem. Annotating articles is why I got this iPad!

For all of those people losing notes, I have not (as of yet) lost any annotations when I use the OneDrive app to annotate my documents. It might be worth a try.

Have had this problem numerous times, eventually got frustrated so much I found somewhat a solution.

If you use GoodNotes or Notability (maybe possible in other apps), you can import your pdf and make notes on it as you'd normally do on paper.

This option has an additional benefit: since extensive drawings make pdfs size considerably larger, you can safely store them in apps cloud, and delete from files.

Just had this problem. Quite infuriating, but I managed to get the notes back embedded in the pdf.

while fiddling with them, I noticed that some of the highlighted sections stayed highlighted, but all notes were gone. Oddly, when I right clicked on the highlight, it gave me the option to remove the note. Which gave me the idea that maybe they were still there, I just couldn’t see them.

So on my Mac, I opened up the pdf file in acrobat… and there all the notes were. I made a quick reply to one of the notes, re saved the pdf in acrobat, and then opened it in finder.

all notes back!

it looks like the issue for me was that preview just wasn’t displaying the little yellow box for the note.

hope this helps.