Notes app note disappeared due to the content in the note

One of my notes in the Notes App disappeared without a trace

I just found a very nasty bug. I do not know why it happened but it has serious consequences if you, like me, keep your whole life documented in the Notes app.

I started noticing that one of my Notes didn’t update correctly between my computers and iPhone/iPad. So one day I started investigating by changing the note on my Mac and then on my iPhone to see when it synced and if it didn’t, try to figure out why. When I was trying this out, all of a sudden the note disappeared from my computer. I immediately checked my iPhone and saw that it was there, only for it to disappear one second later. I checked my Recently Deleted folder but it wasn’t there either. After this I logged in to iCloud on the web only to see that it was gone from there also. At this point I remembered that I had my iPad turned off since I last used it. So I turned off the WiFi in my house and opened the iPad and there the note was. I copied the text in the note, pasted it into a text document on my computer (synced copy/paste) and created a new note. I then checked my iPhone and waited, the note didn’t show up… Then I turned Notes sync off and back on again in settings on my Mac only to find that the newly created note disappeared! When seeing this I thought that there might be something in the actual text that made this happen so I converted the contents of the document to pure text and repeated the operation. This time the new note immediately appeared in my iPhone and the on/off Notes sync didn’t make it disappear as before. So, there is some content in that particular note that, at first, made it not sync properly through iCloud and later made it disappear without a trace.

I still have the formatted text document if needed for troubleshooting. I sincerely hope that someone will check into this matter as soon as possible!

Btw, writing this text in the Notes app. But are now very reluctant to use Notes because of this bug…

macOS 26.1 (25B78)