How can I restore disappeared Notes on my iPhone 12?

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Level 1

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How can I restore disappeared Notes on my iPhone 12?

I used an old post to form my question. The author was dsfcferergvegr. I need to know what he did to get his notes back!!

...Somehow over 500 notes disappeared from my iPhone as I was tinkering with iCloud backup settings. When I went to icloud.com they were also gone from there. I do have a backup with all of my notes inside because I've seen them quickly.

When I restored the backup to my iPhone then went into notes, I saw all my notes for about one second then the screen refreshed and they went away. I do not understand why this is happening or how to stop it. I restored the backup twice and each time the notes vanished after 1 second.

Can someone please tell me why this is happening and how I can restore my notes from a perfectly good backup? Someone in the apple store mentioned turning iphone to airplane mode immediately after back up but I didn't know if that worked or not.

PLEASE HELP!

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

iPhone 12, 18

Posted on Nov 27, 2024 3:06 PM

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Answer 1

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6x6

Level 7

21,237 points

Nov 27, 2024 5:20 PM in response to scoutrule

Hello scoutrule,

Here is something to try. I'm not sure it will work, though:

Immediately after restoring the backup, from the Control Center, turn on Airplane mode and make sure Wi-Fi is turned off (it can stay on depending on how you used Airplane mode in the past.) This will prevent any communication between your iPhone and iCloud.
In Settings > Apps > Notes, turn on "On My iPhone Account" if it's not already on.
In Settings > Apps > Notes, turn off "Group Notes By Date" if it's not already off.
Open Notes and go to the All iCloud folder.
If your notes do not disappear after a few seconds (If they do disappear, I'm sorry but the following won't help you), tap ⋯⃝ (top right) and choose "Select Notes."
Touch the 1st note with 2 fingers and swipe down to select all your notes. This will be slow for 500 notes but you could select them in batch of, say, 100.
Tap Move (bottom left), swipe down and select the Notes folder in the "On My iPhone" location. This will move the selected notes to the local storage of your iPhone.
Repeat steps 6 and 7 if you only selected 100 notes in step 6. Keep doing it until all your notes are in local storage.
Turn off Airplane mode and turn on Wi-Fi.
Go to Settings > [your name] > iCloud and make sure Notes is turned on.
Wait a few minutes to make sure iCloud synchronize. You should then see no notes in the iCloud location and all your notes in the "On My iPhone" location.

If everything went according to plan, repeat steps 4 to 8 but, this time, moving your notes from the "On My iPhone" location to the iCloud location.

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