How do I get my Notes to iCloud?

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.

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.

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.

😁 Well, I felt bad, since you had put out such a great post. I just can't help myself sometimes! Having a degree in English has its downside....

Glad you took it with a sense of humor! It was not meant to be insulting in any way!

Happy you are a contributing member of the community! I think you will be a great asset!

Cheers,

GB

Heather, thank you for a wonderful and thorough reply.

And as to the grammatical cricitism, their, their. [just kidding!!]

Next challenge is that notes periodically, randomly, seem to disappear. I'll find a shopping list not just backed up to my MacBook, but removed from my iPhone. Still figuring that out....a friend who has a <shudder> Droid has a similar problem, and things she wants to save, e.g., measurements for buying curtains, puts them in her Contacts as through Curtains were a business.

@zmoncriefz

Ok do you know where the notes were stored? Like they could have been syncing with a Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, iCloud, etc etc account. Do you have any of these?

Did you have notes turned on in Settings>iCloud on your device?

Did you change any settings on the device before the notes disappeared?

It all depends on where the notes were stored.

Check your settings icon, then notes, what is the default account? What other accounts are shown there as well? If it doesn't list a default account then you are only using one account for notes.

@Ckuttner

Are all of your notes on one account? I would go into Settings on your device and ensure that Settings>Notes, default account displays the account you use. It will also list other accounts syncing notes under the default account option. I would turn off the ones you don't use (you may need to copy them into your preferred account by remaking the notes). This should prevent further issues.

I noticed a while back my yahoo! e-mail accounts were stealing notes I expected to go to iCloud. Since I turned the notes off for these email accounts in Settings>Mail, Contacts and Calendars (tap on account, turn off notes - no it doesn't delete the notes that were stored on that account, just removes them from the phone, you can always turn it back on).

And that resolved that issue I was having with randomly disappearing notes.

Also worth mentioning, you can see which of your notes are under which account by going into the Notes app and tapping "accounts" in the top left corner. This will list all accounts. If you want to move them to another account, you will need to manually copy and paste being sure to add them under the account you want (go into accounts and tap on that account, then hit the + sign to add a new note).

I hope this helps a bit. Notes behave....oddly, to say the least.

It's unbelievable that this still hasn't been simplified. Why can't Apple just add a simple tool that would copy all notes from one account to another? It would be very tedious and time-consuming for me to copy all 131 of my notes by hand, what a pain.

I thank everyone for the input...I still use Notes for occasional quick shopping lists, but this is one time that Apple has let us down. I'm using Evernote and am wondering why I took so long to start doing it...it's lovely, syncs between all my devices, amazingly quickly.

chas

Good tip IllRepute! I had a simplier solution for this, based on your recommendations:

Hardware: iPhone 5S and Macbook pro (Mavericks)

Problem: Old notes on 4 Gmail accounts and iCloud, all over the place.

Goal: All notes on one main gmail account

Steps:

1. On Mac, go to Settings > Internet Accounts > add all accounts impacted (notes only) so they import the notes to the Mac Notes App

2) From Mac Notes App, all the notes on your iphone should show up on your mac too.

3) Drag all notes from other accounts to 1 main account (icloud, or in my case, main gmail account)

4) Check gmail.com (notes folder) to see if it's all been synced.

5) once confirmed, go back to Settings > Internet Accounts and disable the syncing of notes on those other accounts

6) On your iPhone, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts and Calendars and check to remove notes from other accounts from syncing

7) On your iPhone, go to Settings > Notes, and check the default setting. This caused the problem in the first place as new notes would be created from secondary accounts

All these steps helped me centralize my notes from the past, and proof it for the future on Gmail. Hope this helps.

I am using iTunes 11.1.5 and there is no checkbox next to "Replace information on this phone" in the "Advanced" pane, so I'm not even able to complete the first step of your solution. This is the most recent version of iTunes, so I can't update anything to try to fix this. Any suggestions?