How do I get my Notes to iCloud?

This worked! Thanks! Still trying to figure out the Notes sync thing....but this is a great start!

I had a bunch of notes "on my iPhone". I followed step 1 in IllRepute's post from Nov 8 and sure enough, on the iPhone, these same notes are now in the "From my Mac" account. However, the notes did not sow up in Mail.app under Notes on my mac. But when I followed step 1 on my iPad, the notes originally on my iPhone showed up there as well. So the notes must be on my mac. Since they don't show up, I cannot follow step 2 etc.

Any ideas why this may be happening?

Thanks anyway. The notes that I change I will manually move to iCloud by copying and pasting. At least all my notes are available on iPhone and IPad, though not on Mac itself...

Alice, I'm glad this is partially working for you. Jefw added a couple tips that I forgot to mention. Are you sure you have your new iCloud email account (the new @me.com email address you had to create for iCloud) added to Mail.app on your computer? Without this, the notes will not show up there. Good luck!

Alice, did you go to your mail preferences on your Mac and turn on view notes? I don't have it right in front of me, but I know to get my iCloud account notes to show up and be editable on my Mac in Snowleopard, I had to make an adjustment in mail preferences. Now I can create and edit notes on all devices without going to Lion.

IllRepute,

Can you you help!?!?! Your other post helped me to los half of my Notes, seemingly for good!!

I followed your steps, it did not get the notes associated with my Yahoo and Gmail accounts. Can't figure out why ANY notes would ever be associated with them in the first place.

Well, after I dragged the "On My Mac" Notes to the iCloud folder on my Mac's Mail App, I checked the phone and there were doubles of most of my notes, so I Deleted the duplicates there and they deleted from my Mac Mail program too. I thought, I'd better try syncing them again in iTunes and after doing so I went from 29 Notes down to 16,

Some of these notes were very precious to me, WHAT DO I DO!?!?!?! As user, playing $300 for AppleCare does nothing because they just blame it on the phone and they're off the hook at Apple. HELP!

Hey there, were the notes originally on your iPhone? I'd try doing a restore from your last backup, (assuming it was recent). If the notes were on your desktop/laptop you could try to restore them from Time Machine. I'm not sure why this happened as I haven't needed to mess with my notes in quite some time. The important thing is to get all the notes you do want into the iCloud email account and delete the others/duplicates. It sounds like you may have inadvertantly deleted the iCloud notes from one device and the duplicates from another device then synced and lost both copies on both devices.

I hope you have a backup as this is probably your only option now. Good luck and let me know I can help further.

Think you

I was having the same problem and was able to fix it by turning on iCloud on all of my apple devices and adding my iCloud email account to my mac mail. Disable syncing notes to all email accounts except for iCloud account on all devices. Take whatever device you have that has the notes on it that are not syncing and plug it into your mac. Wait for iTunes to launch and if it doesnt manually launch it yourself. Select your device in iTunes and go to info tab and scroll down to the "other" section and select sync notes. Make sure under the "advanced" the notes box is unchecked. Click apply and merge info. Once syncing is complete go to your mac mail and under the "reminders" and "notes" sections you will now have an "on my mac" there. Click the "on my mac" notes then select all notes and right click, select move to iCloud and then all your notes will magically load on all your devices that you have iCloud and notes syncing turned on.

All of these suggestions seem extremely helpful except that I have a PC...does anyone know a similar method to dragging the iphone notes to icloud on a PC???

Thanks! This worked just fine. I just selected the 'On my Iphone' notes, copied, then pasted them to the iCloud account. They instantly popped up in the Notes app on the Mac.

Not hard at all but good to know that only newly created notes will be synced.

Notes is no longer in iTunes 11 under "other" - so how do i get all my old notes to sync with my MAC so i can then get them into the cloud?

simply

go to the note

select all

copy

add new note in icloud

paste

done

thank you

Hassan...I have no idea how, in iOS, to add a new note in iClould. Am I missing something here?

Hi Ckuttner,

First you want to make sure new notes are iCloud notes.

To make sure your new notes are being added to iCloud by default on iOS 5 or 6, go to settings on your iPhone or iOS device, then "Notes". Under default account should show iCloud or your iCloud account name / description.

If it does not show iCloud and iCloud is not an option for you to select when you tap on it, then you'll need to go to Settings>iCloud. Ensure you are signed in to your apple ID here. Next ensure that "Notes" is set to ON.

If notes is not on, you will not be able to turn it on unless you have already configured mail. This is as easy as turning iCloud Mail to ON in the same place. If it has already been configured it will turn on when you tap the switch, then you can tap the Notes ON switch. If it hasn't been configured for iCloud mail, you will get a prompt to create an @icloud.com email. This is normal. Create the email, it is the only way to use iCloud for notes (which generally if your icloud notes are accidentally deleted AppleCare can recover them, if its still within 7 days of the accidental deletion, in most cases, so this alone is a good reason to switch to iCloud).

Anyway, once you get Mail and Notes turned on in Settings > iCloud on your device, go back to Settings > Notes and make sure the Default Account now shows iCloud or your iCloud account name / description.

Now that this is done, click your home button (the round button below the screen). Then tap the Notes App. There is a + in the upper right corner of the screen. Tapping this will create a new note. All new notes are automatically saved and added to iCloud instantly!

For those who want to move their notes to iCloud, as others have said the best way to do this is simple copy and paste. (copy from the note that is on the wrong account - like Yahoo, Google, On my iPhone, etc, then create a new note (after ensuring Settings>Notes displays default account as iCloud) and paste. The note will now be in iCloud.

For those who want to see what account specific notes are on, go to the Notes App on your device. Tap "Accounts" in the top left corner. This will show all the accounts that currently have notes stored on them. This way you can figure out what notes are on what account and consolidate them (as described above) if you want.

For those who lost notes, it is best practice is to backup iCloud data regularly (not just an iCloud backup since many data types are not included in the icloud backup, and are instead up dated instantly, which is normally a good thing...unless you accidentally delete something, in which case it will disappear from all your devices/computers signed into iCloud. Examples of iCloud data that behaves like this include: iCloud Calendars, iCloud Contacts, iCloud Reminders, etc. see resources below for more detailed info)

- How to backup your iCloud data - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4910

- Or make an iTunes backup (in a worst case scenario iCloud data can be extracted from these iTunes backups, but the process is long and complex since when you connect to cellular or internet iCloud will overwrite this data by default, but it can be done)

Resources -

- iCloud backup and restore overview (what does iCloud backup?) - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4859

- iCloud: What's in an iCloud Backup? - http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2584

- How to backup your iCloud data - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4910

- About iTunes Backups (what does iTunes Backup?), please note if backing up with iTunes, please also Sync and Transfer Purchases in iTunes to create a COMPLETE backup - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4946

- iOS: Syncing Notes - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4191

- Recovering iCloud data from an iTunes Backup (difficult, last resort) - http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4108

I hope this helps someone! 🙂

Hi heather,

Great post! But one thing:

For those who want to move there notes to iCloud,

Their, there....they're not the same....

GB