My notes are not syncing between Mac and iPhone

Had similar issue and noticed that the problem was my icloud. If the icloud storage is full it won't sync. It worked as soon as I made some storage available.

temporarily creating another user on my Mac and signing in with iCloud seems to have fixed the issue. when i opened Reminders and Notes it ran through its setup and then everything started working. i logged back into my admin account, and then that started syncing.

Thanks for this solution. Opened Notes on my computer, went to to Accounts>icloud and turned "sync" notes off, then on again. Then I could see all my missing notes from my iPhone 12.

Thanks Leah,

I moved notes from the folder "On My iPhone" to the folder "iCloud" and immediately my notes synced to the MacBook

I also lost my notes on my iphone but in icloud all is there. What I did was I went to settings and then Notes selected account which is Icloud and then toggled off Notes then rebooted my iphone. When it turned on I went back to the same path and then toggled it on and then relaunch Notes on my iphone and voila my icloud notes are loaded back.

Hope it helps.

Followed all the instructions above but to no effect. What I ended up doing was closing the Notes app on the Mac and then reopening it. Then it synced up with the iCloud where the changes and updates made via the iPhone were available.

It would be nice to have an icon which does a refresh to the iCloud. Just my two cents.

I have another solution for anyone having this issue in 2024/2025. This what worked for me, at first it wasn't so obvious, but it worked.

Open the Notes app on your phone > Theirs Two folders One at the top is named "iCloud" thats where you want all your notes written or forwarded from your "On my phone" if you want them sync with all your devices.

Then you have the next folder "On my iPhone" which is exactly what it says, all notes written on there are saved on your phone only.

Your notes on your Mac (desktop/Laptop) device can be configured as you wish by opening the Notes app and clicking > Note at the top of menu then clicking > Settings.

Anyone having these problems? I fixed it. Basically I copied and pasted all my text notes and then permanently deleted all notes data from iCloud …. it deleted absolutely everything! Then i turned notes off and on and oilá, everything synced!

Which device has more notes than the other? Today I discovered several New Notes on my phone ( v10) would not sync to my Mac 12.6.7. Once I deleted the New Notes on my phone, the number of notes on each device was the same. If this doesn't help to sync. come back here with more information about which device has more notes. I also found I had to stop using all tags and subfolders. Some devices can create these but other devices cannot see them.

this worked for me:

go to settings, iCloud, Apps using iCloud, Show All, scroll down to Notes, select then turn on Sync this iPhone

I hope this works for you

Following the steps of signing out and signing back in fixed my issues as well it seems like there is some kind of caching issue with Apple notes that needs to be fixed.

PROBLEM SOLVED

This worked for me too.

1. Opened notes and went to Notes/Accounts,
2. Clicked "Add Account" button,
3. Selected iCloud,
4. Logged in with my iCloud details.
5. Restarted machine.
6. Created a new test note on the iPhone.
7. At first it didn't sync... Neither to the notes app or on logging into into iCloud Notes in Safari.
8. I refreshed the page in Safari and it started syncing normally to the app as well.

For what it is worth, I have an older Mac and newer iPhone and newer iPad. Notes on the Mac is an older version of Notes compared to Notes on iPhone and iPad. It seems impossible to tell exactly what Notes version — not OS version - you have on each device BUT if one device is older, it stops some notes syncing across all devices. In my case if I create a note using Tags or tables on the iPad it does not sync -even between devices that could use Tags, because one device does not use Tags - in my case my old Mac. A message does pop up saying This note in not supported on some of your devices. It means not supported on ALL your devices and so won’t work on ANY device - that’s just ff’ing great, if you ask me. I’ll try to disconnect the Mac from all accounts used by Notes and only use Notes by logging into iCloud and see what that does. In the meantime, I’ll keep the notes in Notes very simple.

UPDATE using new features on new iPad, DOES sync on new iPhone. But not on older Mac - so I’ll browse to iCloud on the Mac to access Notes to see if the new features are syncing there.

I just figured out that a note will not sync to iCloud if it begins with a number (i.e. if the title of the note begins with a number). Seems like it must begin with a letter. Strange.

For me, the issue showed up after signing out of my id and signing back in. Once I opened notes and turned on sync nothing happened. I went back in, turned it off and turned it right back on and everything loaded.