Help! iCloud synced notes disappeared!

There may be hope. I experienced loss of all NOTES last week, without any action on my part. Fretting to the max, I

Finally went to Macbook Pro spotlight, entered a keyword for each of my Notes and Voila, they popped up. I have all of them on my MBP in editted format which is great. Have backed up with email! Don't know how to transfer them back to Ipad, other than synch. Plus why would I trust Ipad for this?

Reading all this I appear to be another victim whose trust in the cloud has now disappeared.

I also have lost all of my important notes on the ipad..new to the ipad and didn't back up. Very frustrating!

If you have a macbook you can find your notes. Use Spotlight to type in a few wors in your note titles and they will display. You can move the notes around via Mail or on your Macbook. Without the Macbook, try the Spotlight ketboard on the farthest left og the Apps pages. Type in a few words. i was able to retrieve all of my notes without backup.

Good luck

Try this. Connect your device to your PC via the USB. Open iTunes. Select your iOS device. In the window that opens click on Info at the top. Scroll to advance section at the bottom. Tick the next sync only box then select what you want to sync from your PC back up in iTunes to your device.

Thanks for this suggestion, unfortunately I cannot get it to work. I think the notes must have been deleted during the change over to the cloud.

Hello again. Sorry to hear that did not work for you. Out of interest, can you confirm whether you have windows PC or Mac, and, whether you have ever synced through iTunes to your machine at any time prior to losing your notes.?

I was happily syncing with iTunes on my PC running Windows XP Pro and my laptop using Vista. It all went wrong when the Apple Store changed me to Yahoo and the Cloud. Now I cannot sync on my desktop and appear to have permanently lost my notes which were on the desktop and laptop. I assume that now I have tried to sync on both a number of times the notes will have been written over. I can sync on the laptop OK and tried your suggestion on both the desktop and laptop without finding my notes.

Connect ypur device to your PC and open iTunes. When your device appears on the left, right click its icon and select restore from Back-up. A dialogue box will appear with a list (one) available back-up. It will be dated. What is the date of that backp please. Cancel out of the box without selecting to proceed further.

There are other places, back up information may be stored dependent on your settings for email accounts in the cloud. I will run through them with you when I know what your PC back-up dates are. .Do the same for your XP PRO machine too.

Before you post back onelast thing. Have you turned on Spotlight search in your device settings, and have you tried to locate any of your missing work using the spotlight search feature. IE Home screen, tap home button onece, type in first word of any known work to see if locations are given.

Speak soon.

Coppertiger, thank you for taking an interest in this proplem.

My Sony laptop has a backup for 11.02 2012 at 16.15 hrs.

My PC has a backup at yesterday 21.03.12 at 21.57 hours. This date is before I visited the Apple Store at Bluewater on 20 March and they altered my settings when I asked for assistance in using my iPhone. Although I have had it over a year I am still learning its tricks!

Spotlight search is turned on, but when I search I only get the notes that I have made since all the others disappeared.

Even though I backed up my PC yesterday it has not put any of my contacts or calendar information onto the PC.

Any further help would be appreciated.

Coppertiger - to clarify the Sony backup date is the one before alterations to the iPhone on 20 March.

Thankyou for that. Now can you confirm if you have the iCloud Control Panel on either your Desktop or Sony. If so then log into it. (If not download it and install it on one of your machines (vista preferably) It will show you options for backing up your machine the same as an i device. Mine are blank, as I control backup operations from my iPad itself. However the Manage Storage button will take you to a box giving you details of your last backup to the cloud from any of your devices. What is the date of that?

Once you have this info kick up your i Device and log into Settings/iCloud and turn your iCloud backup off. (Do not delete your account or alter any other settings at this point. Your icloud back up will be preserved and this will stop it being overwritten. It will however mean that a back up can be performed between your iDevice and and either of your other two machines. However the syncing and Back up files are different files, but best to ensure that the autosync function is off on iTunes See Edit/Preferences/Devices tab and recheck the tick is in the "Prevent ipods, ipads etc syncing automatically"

What I am hoping is that you will have three complete backups available (various dates). These will be kept as .db files (database) files. One in each location (I presume as such they will also be in a standard sql format too (most are).

With an Apple Engineers help I believe we could then ask Apple to preserve and break open your Cloud backup. And give you details on how to copy the PC and Laptop files and email to them so they could do the same with them (Have the location for Vista but not on an XP machine). With your DB files in the safe hands of an Engineer, they should then be able to extract the data snippets you are after, assemble them to a text file and email them back to you.

Syncing and Backup seem to verify distinctly different types of data, but at this point I am not sure what is shared or overwritten in any particular data location container, so please avoid manually syncing too if you can.

At least that is the plan... fingers crossed.

The date of the last backup on my iPhone is 21.03.2012 at 2.57

I have turned off iCloud backup and checked the box in iTunes as you advised. I am not sure whether I can find the backup files on all three, but will try tomorrow. Where do we go from here?

You are obviously have a lot of experience with these devices, can I ask whether your work for Apple or are someone who has just made it an interest?

I look forward to your advice on the next step.

Just an interest from an old habit of biting anything technical. Saw this email update quite late, so will leave next steps till tomorrow afternoon GMT. Best wishes and thankyou for your endeavours too.

Try this. Reassociate your old email with the yourApple Account. Switch everything off ad back on with the cloud active and Notes app active for cloud in settings.

Open notes App and at top of left hand side tap on Accounts. Have a peruse and see if your missing notes now show up.