How do I get my Notes to iCloud?

you got me 😊 glad there's this handy edit feature.

😁 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.

Go into settings on iphone, scroll down to the icloud symbol. open it. scroll down to notes, turn it on.

I think Bob is long gone....his post was for October of 2011....

Cheers,

GB

ok i havent backed up my iphone 5 recently and just lost important notes! is there any way to get them back?? thanks!

@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.

This article tells how to get rid of duplicates easily:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4191

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?

Just use CopyTrans Contacts :

http://www.copytrans.net/support/how-to-transfer-notes-from-on-my-iphone-account -to-icloud/

you can copy/paste your old notes to new notes. sync them to icloud and then erase the old ones.