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Has anyone else notes suddenly disappeared from their iPhone?

I used my notes on the Sunday and when I checked on the Monday every note had disappeared. They weren't in my recently deleted folder either. Apple support says there is no data to recover. Unfortunately I hadn't backed my phone up to iCloud or otherwise. I have really sentimental and important information on my notes (like my kids first words etc) so Im doing everything I can to get them back. Any ideas?

iPhone SE, iOS 14

Posted on Mar 14, 2023 1:02 PM

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Posted on Mar 14, 2023 2:04 PM

Notes can either be contained entirely on the phone or can sync to an email account or accounts. If they were in the category “On this iPhone” you can recover them by restoring a backup. But notes synced to email accounts are not contained in a backup, and depend on the data integrity features of the email account they sync to.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 14, 2023 2:04 PM in response to melhanfish

Notes can either be contained entirely on the phone or can sync to an email account or accounts. If they were in the category “On this iPhone” you can recover them by restoring a backup. But notes synced to email accounts are not contained in a backup, and depend on the data integrity features of the email account they sync to.

Mar 14, 2023 2:51 PM in response to melhanfish

If you sync photos to iCloud you would just sync them back after restoring the iPhone.


iCloud+ has 2 independent functions. iCloud backups, and iCloud sync. It’s confusing because they both have the same name prefix. But they have no connection with each other. Go to Settings/[your name]/iCloud. You will see a bunch of switches (with iOS 16 also tap Show All). When you turn on a switch that data type will sync to iCloud. If you do this on multiple devices that share an Apple ID the selected data will sync to all of those devices. 


You can also turn on iCloud Backups. This will back up your phone every night if the phone is plugged in, connected to Wi-Fi and locked.


But note that anything that you sync by the first method will be excluded from the iCloud backups.

Has anyone else notes suddenly disappeared from their iPhone?

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