Notes ... help

I use Notes A LOT! Not until I watched a vid from a well known Mac guy, did I realize that backups and restoring not so easy. That led, of course, to much searching--all to no avail I'm afraid; primarily, I think due to the changing of MacOS versions. One early suggestion was to turn off notes in icloud, add folder to mac, etc, etc. Never worked. I readded notes to icloud. But, things are different now. When I open notes, I have 2 locations showing. The name I've assigned to the icloud email account for my apple account and the name I've assigned to a 2nd email account I had created. No longer does notes identify the location of the notes in iCloud or does it show On my Mac. What happened?