Help! iCloud synced notes disappeared!
Hi,
I am hoping that someone can help and knows if there is a way to recover my iCloud synced notes which disappeared yesterday afternoon. A bit of history first:
I am running 10.7.2 on my Mac and iOS 5 on my iPhone 4 and iPad 2. Prior to activating iCloud a few weeks ago, I was syncing my Notes across my Mac, iPhone and iPad via iTunes and everything worked great.
Once I upgraded to iOS 5 and activated iCloud, I selected the option in iTunes to sync my Notes via iCloud. This created two sets of notes on each device; the iPhone Notes app had two accounts, iPhone and iCloud; the iPad Notes app had two accounts, iPad and iCloud; and the Mac Mail app had two accounts in the Notes section, On My Mac and iCloud.
I realized that only the Notes created in the iCloud account of the respective devices would sync via iCloud. Following advice I had read here on the Apple Support Communities, I set the iCloud Notes account as the default account for both my iPhone and iPad, and moved the Notes in the Mail app on my Mac from the "On My Mac" account to the "iCloud" account. I did this a couple of weeks ago and everything had been working great; I now only had one Notes account on both my iPhone and iPad, and everything was syncing as one would expect between my iPhone, iPad and Mac.
At least everything was working great until yesterday afternoon; I opened the Notes app on my iPhone and was startled to find the app read "No Notes". I next opened the Notes app on my iPad and actually saw all of my Notes for half a second before they all disappeared and then it too read "No Notes"! I next opened the Mail app on my Mac and also had no Notes. Finally, I logged into iCloud.com and opened up the Mail app to also find that I had no Notes.
Has anyone else experienced this? Why would this have happened? I had initially backed up all of the Notes when I first made the switch to iCloud a couple of weeks ago, expecting some initial trouble with the first sync. But everything has been running smoothly for about 2 weeks, I hadn't made a backup since. Isn't iCloud supposed to be my backup? Does iCloud make a backup of itself that I can access to get all of my Notes back from yesterday morning? I am also Syncing my Calendar and Contacts via iCloud, but if this could happen to my Notes, I am afraid that it could also happen to my Calendar and Contacts.
I realize that many, if not most, of software errors are actually attributable to user error, but in this case, I do not see what I possibly could have done wrong. I don't think it's even possible to delete all of the Notes from my iPhone with one click, is it?
If there is no way to recover from a loss like this, the iCloud service is worthless. Hopefully there is a way for users to access an iCloud backup/snapshot of thier data so that losses like this can be prevented.
I do make nightly backups of my Mac via SuperDuper to an external HD, so I should have backups of my Mac's Mail app, as well as iTunes generated backups of my iPhone and iPad from when all of my notes were on iCloud. I was thinking of loading these backups while I was offline and recovering my Notes that way, but I do not know if iCloud data is available locally while offline. Does anyone know if iCloud Notes can be accessed on your Mac, iPhone or iPad if the device is offline?
Any info/insight would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Bruno
iPhone 4, iOS 5
