Notes wont sync between Iphone and Mac on Mountain Lion

Good for you! I did all that many times. Please refer to Sankeyvisreply. I get exactly his error messages. Does your IMAP server require the setting of a IMAP Path Prefix? I think that is where the problem lies. There seems to be a trend that notes do not work for IMAP accounts that require a path prefix.I have to set the prefix INBOX on my iPhone and iPad and in my mail. All that works, but not the notes app. (BTW - I DID set the prefix there as well).

AppleSince86 wrote:

Notes in Mountain Lion works perfectly. (I'm using a Cyrus IMAP server.)

No they do not. They work only if you have configured the alternative namespace on your Cyrus IMAP server. If you use the standard mailbox representation method the apple client is bugged.

If you would like to see some debug information use this command from a command line interface:

/Applications/Notes.app/Contents/MacOS/Notes -LogActivityOnPort <yourIMAPPort>

replace <yourIMAPPort> with either standard ports 143 or 993.

The master case for this bug in the apple developer forum is 10952870.

This is unacceptable. I have over 150 notes on my iPhone, I'm not going to copy/paste all of them in to a new note just to get it to sync properly.

I'm seriously considering downgrading back to Lion over the weekend.

Hi everyone, I finally solved the problem of notes on iPhone not going to the Mac, for me anyway. I went to settings and scrolled down to the Notes app, and saw that my default account was set to Gmail.

Well, of course they wouldn't sync that way - in my Mail, Contacts, and Calendars (or whatever it's called), Notes is set to sync in iCloud but not my Gmail accounts. I changed the default account in the Notes app on my iPhone to iCloud, and boom! The next note typed on my iPhone synced with all my devices.

Yaay!

But of course, none of your previous notes are going to show up on the Notes app in Mountain Lion, right? Your solution will only cause Notes from now on to show up in Mountain Lion, but will not bring your previous notes into Mountain Lion.

You still do not have the ability to see and edit your previous notes on your Mac, so unfortunately this is not a real solution.

LiatMGat's tip from August 3rd fixed it!!! I kep on turning Notes "on" in my iCloud settings, but it would automatically revert back to off. I turned Notes on in my Gmail account, and instantly all my notes on my devices (2 computers, ipad, and iphone) are in sync.

Does that include the notes that are in the "On my Mac" category?

"On my mac" didn't sync, but I just dragged them over to my Gmail account, and now they appear everywhere.

On the bottom of the note list side (or under View - show folder list) there is an icon to display the folder list. There you will see both your Gmail and on My mac notes. You can create different folders to help organize.

Be sure to adjust your gmail notes settings on all your computers and iOS devices.

Ha!! Yes! I knew this would help someone. So glad your notes are syncing now! 😀

Could not agree any more with everything you said. I've been so frustrated with this for 2 weeks.

"frankly the Notes sync is the reason I upgraded to Mountain Lion in the first place." = yes, me too.

And why Notes can't be as simple as Contacts, I have NO idea. Argh.

May be only the existing notes items are not being pushed to the cloud?

Did anyone try to copy all the text in the body and paste it into a new note as a fresh notes item?

iCloud (or other cloud provider, e.g. Google) work for syncing notes. It's the notes that weren't in the cloud prior to installing Mountain Lion that is causing the problems.

If your notes are on your Mac, you should be able to drag and drop the notes from the "On My Mac" category to the "iCloud" (or other) category in the new Notes app. (If you don't see "On My Mac", creating a new folder in iCloud should then show it.)

If your notes are on your iPhone, there is no way currently to move them from the "On My iPhone" category to the "iCloud" (or other) category. In this case, you have at least two options: Look for the Notes.mbox on your hard drive (~/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes/Notes.mbox) and drag this into the Notes application. If you don't find this, and you're on Time Machine, you can go back to a time before you installed Mountain Lion in the ~/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes/ directory and look for it there. If you still can't find your notes on your Mac, but they are definitely on the iPhone, you can sync your phone with another Mac that has OS X Lion (10.7.x) installed, and choose to sync your notes in iTunes. You can then recover your Notes in the manner I described above on the hard drive.

I got a call from an Apple engineer, and he confirmed that it was indeed an intentional design decision to disable syncing of Notes from the iPhone to the Mac via iTunes. But the above suggestions should work for you, if you don't want to copy and paste all your notes into new notes in iCloud.

READ ALL OF THIS BEFORE YOU ATTEMPT ANYTHING! If you lose any data, I'm sorry, but you're getting what you paid for and it worked for me, so I can't help you.

The problem, at least for me and apparently for a lot of us, is that my notes date back to 2009 and were created before iCloud existed. They defaulted to being created On My iPhone, and nothing existed to port them through the iCloud so they would be backed up. I went to the Apple Store in El Paso on Monday and spent half an hour with a Genius, we fiddled and finally concluded that you can't get there from here. The only solution seems to be to re-create all Notes that you want backed up via iCloud. I do not consider this acceptable, but what can you do?

I found the easiest way to do this was on my iPhone, it was faster with my thumb than it was with my trackpad on my laptop, at least for me. Your mileage may vary. I'm sure a clever person could write a macro or script to do it, but I knew it would take me longer to write and debug such a thing than to do it manually. So here are my steps:

1. On your iPhone, go to Settings/iCloud. Make sure you're signed in, make sure Notes is turned on.
2. Still in Settings, make sure your Notes settings are to Default Account iCloud
3. Open Notes, Scroll down to oldest note, open it.
4. Select All, Copy, + (create new note), Paste, Done.
5. You should still be at the bottom of your list, delete the old note that you just copied.
6. Go to step 3. Rinse, repeat. Stop when you get to Notes dated today. By starting with the bottom of the list, your Notes should still be in chronological sequence.

BEFORE YOU DO THIS, create a couple of Notes with the iCloud settings turned on to make sure your account is working and everything is flowing through. If it isn't, then I don't know what to recommend but I wouldn't go through with this.

When you're done, on your phone open Notes, click Accounts, and click On My iPhone. It should be blank. Anything left there might need to be recreated for iCloud. Open Notes on your computer and click the iCloud tab and verify all your notes are there.

It took me just over an hour to review and copy 140 notes dating back to 2009, I deleted about 20 along the way that were either dupes or no longer needed.

In my case, I had only changed or created about a dozen Notes since upgrading to 10.8, and my phone was backed up to my laptop about a week before I did the upgrade, so the copies that I have are reasonably fresh in case I screwed something up.

Sildani:

I like your suggestion of dragging and dropping to move things to the cloud within Notes, I wish I'd tried that. I normally use a trackpad, and I hate dragging and dropping with it, but I keep a wireless mouse around for just such occasions.

I got a call from an Apple engineer, and he confirmed that it was indeed an intentional design decision to disable syncing of Notes from the iPhone to the Mac via iTunes. But the above suggestions should work for you, if you don't want to copy and paste all your notes into new notes in iCloud.

I'm sorry, I'm afraid this is completely mistaken. There definitely IS a bug with Notes, and the specific bug is that Notes no longer syncs via IMAP, even if IMAP settings are properly applied.

Switching over to syncing via iCloud is NOT a solution, as all this does is avoid the problem by switching to a different syncing method.

The simple fact is, the Notes app does indeed support syncing via IMAP as a setting, yet Notes CANNOT be synced via IMAP, which is the bug. This is the critical fact that no one has yet resolved.