Disappearing iPad note markups

I have the exact same issue. Hours of work marking up documents as a uni student and it all suddenly erases when I’m still editing the document. I have the Ipad Pro 12.9” with magic keyboard and pencil - spent about £2,000 in total and issues like this are occuring? I bought this in order to be able to mark up documents etc. and thought with the price would come quality too. Very frustrating.

Nah. Not even good for artists. I used notes to draw often and since then they have not only removed the zoom in option, but I ran here looking for a solution for the same problem. 10 hrs+ worth of work. gone. Wish there was a solution but I haven't found one that fully solves my case yet :/

After one year and several updates, looks like the issue is still as prevalent as ever

Dear Apple support,

I just lost 6 hours of work in markup in a very important document for my work.

I find useless that you add this option in your files if you are not going to solve a bug that could make you loose all your info without any way to back up.

Thank you for creating a super expensive tool that cant do such a basic thing.

I experienced this issue today as well. I’ve notified Apple of the bug - I don’t imagine that we’ll get a fix soon. Looking for third party apps that will work instead. Also incredibly disappointed that this isn’t working smoothly on a very expensive device.

I just lost a whole morning’s worth of notes and markups in a PDF. It looked like the document froze, then poof everything I did for the day was gone. Is this problem just the native pdf markup, or is does it affect all pdfs in apple even if using a third party app? How is there not an auto save or at least a save button? The document I’m working on is over 3,000 pages; I can’t just close and open it easily

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.)

It is nearly 2023 and the problem is still not resolved? Wow, no comment. This is maybe the 10th time I am losing my notes, came to search about what is happening, and the problem is still not resolved? Very disappointed!

As Apple DO NOT fix this annotation problem on PDF over the years, which can causing users keep losing their very valuable data, and there is no bug fixed from Apple so far, so I’ll draw the attention of my work place, and plan to move out the usage of 2000 Apple devices, by our business users as many as possible. Thank you.

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.

Omg, I just had the same thing!!! While taking notes of a lecture while preparing for the exam, I suddenly noticed after a short break my notes had entirely disappeared! How can that be possible with the automatic saving features apps nowadays have? When offering a function such as note-taking on pdf and other types of files, it is just crucial to make sure they are saved. Or at least guide a user and make them save it (there is currently no such button in the UI).

Same here. Hundreds of pages of annotations on middle-english literature gone 2 days before my midterm. No possible way to revert the file to a time when it contained by annotations-- somehow the file only backed up before I took my notes and after they suddenly disappeared as I was writing. Thanks a ton, Apple.

One thing to try:

Open the pdf in preview and go view - highlights and notes. Often they are there, they just don't show up in the main view for whatever reason.

Alternatively, open it in acrobat. Sometimes they just show up... and if not, sometimes fiddling with them in acrobat and re-saving it causes them to return.

For me, the highlights and notes were still in the pdf... just not showing up in preview's main window.

whatt!? I lost all my mark up pdf files on files app, It’s really important to me what did you guys just do!? How can i get it back?? Fix that apple

GoodReader still exists in the Apple iOS App Store and has had recent updates, as well.

GoodReader

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/goodreader-pdf-editor-viewer/id777310222

🙂