Upon upgrading to Mountain Lion, only "notes" that were on iCloud got transferred into the new "Notes" app

I have the same problem.

No quick solution. Touch the Accounts button on the top left of the screen on your iphone. Look to see which other accounts other than iCloud you have. From within those other accounts, copy the content of a note (or cut), and go back to the iCloud account and create a new note and paste the content.

If the notes are listed in an IMAP account and you have properly added that same account to your iCloud settings in Mountain Lion, check this thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4135315?start=0&tstart=0

Update:

By signing out of iCloud and disabling notes in Google, I was finally able to get Notes to show "On My Mac" category, albeit empty. I created one test note:

http://imgur.com/fELj3

I then signed back into iCloud and renabled Google notes. Now all three show up!

http://imgur.com/bPFwR

But my notes from my iPhone are still missing from the Mac. 😟

I synced my iPhone via iTunes at this point to see if I can then see my iPhone notes on my Mac (or vice-versa, see the new "On My Mac" note I created in Mountain Lion on my iPhone) but it didn't work.

Jace Cavacini wrote:

No quick solution. Touch the Accounts button on the top left of the screen on your iphone. Look to see which other accounts other than iCloud you have. From within those other accounts, copy the content of a note (or cut), and go back to the iCloud account and create a new note and paste the content.

If the notes are listed in an IMAP account and you have properly added that same account to your iCloud settings in Mountain Lion, check this thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4135315?start=0&tstart=0

I appreciate the idea, Jace. But if a user has 500 notes, or 5,000 notes, the copy/paste solution isn't feasible. Apple should do better here.

You're absolutely right. The only other idea i have is to try using another machine or OS install that has the older OS version on it, temporarily, to move them from one category/account to the other (from iphone/my/IMAP computer to iCloud).

This situation is a great example of Apple creating a feature and NOT testing it like real people USE it. i don't know how they managed to screw this up so badly, since they're all about usability. Maybe it's a bug, but still... Test test test. And i note that it's another case of IMAP problems, which their email clients have a history of failing to properly handle.

Jace Cavacini wrote:

You're absolutely right. The only other idea i have is to try using another machine or OS install that has the older OS version on it, temporarily, to move them from one category/account to the other (from iphone/my/IMAP computer to iCloud).

This situation is a great example of Apple creating a feature and NOT testing it like real people USE it. i don't know how they managed to screw this up so badly, since they're all about usability. Maybe it's a bug, but still... Test test test. And i note that it's another case of IMAP problems, which their email clients have a history of failing to properly handle.

That's exactly what I'm planning to do later on today: I'm going to sync my iPhone against OS X 10.7 Lion on another Mac so that I have the opportunity to migrate my Notes from hard drive to cloud. I'm thankful I have that option, not everybody does. (Or the expertise to roll back their OS X version, via Time Machine or not.)

I had this problem - all the notes I wanted were "On My Mac", which vanished as soon as I upgraded (and weren't in the new Notes app either). In the end, I had to find the files which Mountain Lion had failed to migrate to the new app, in the following location:

~/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes/Notes.mbox/

There was one folder containing a whole bunch of numbered folders inside that. Going through each of the numbered folders right down to the "Messages" folder inside each, I found one or more files of the name format "nnnnn.emlx" (where "n" is a numeral). I copied all the .emlx files I found into a single (other) directory - as a backup in case something didn't work or I needed to do it again - then selected them all and dragged and dropped them onto the Notes app.

It's pretty poor form that the upgrade process doesn't reliably handle On My Mac notes, but at least it's not too difficult to recover.

Hope this works for others!

Robin Darroch wrote:

I had this problem - all the notes I wanted were "On My Mac", which vanished as soon as I upgraded (and weren't in the new Notes app either). In the end, I had to find the files which Mountain Lion had failed to migrate to the new app, in the following location:

~/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes/Notes.mbox/

There was one folder containing a whole bunch of numbered folders inside that. Going through each of the numbered folders right down to the "Messages" folder inside each, I found one or more files of the name format "nnnnn.emlx" (where "n" is a numeral). I copied all the .emlx files I found into a single (other) directory - as a backup in case something didn't work or I needed to do it again - then selected them all and dragged and dropped them onto the Notes app.

It's pretty poor form that the upgrade process doesn't reliably handle On My Mac notes, but at least it's not too difficult to recover.

Hope this works for others!

Bingo! This worked for me.

I can't thank you enough Robin. Truly. Thank you for sharing this.

I've tried this solution, but I still can't find my old "on my mac" notes.

I also checked in my Time Machine's backup

~/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes/Notes.mbox/

But I'm still finding this folder empty, although it says it is 12kb large.

Any other idea on where the "On my mac" notes should have been?

I had the same issue and spent a ton of time on the phone with Apple iCloud support and a level 2 Mountain Lion engineer. The only option they could figure out was to go into Time Machine and find the old notes to copy over. I have looked and only can find the notes that were sync'd with iCloud. The other notes seem to be stuck in limbo on my iPhone.

The other big issue is that the new iTunes removes the option to sync Notes. My only recommendation is that Apple needs to let people know to ensure your notes are migrated before upgrading to Mountain Lion. It truly seems that this was an oversight by the developers.

Pretty huge oversight. I mean, didn't any Apple developers actually USE notes on multiple devices?

I was having the same problem, but I found my notes in

~/Library/Mail/V2/IMAP-(my email address)/INBOX.mbox/Notes.mbox/

Also I wasn't able to just drag the notes to the Notes app. I actually had to open them (they open as a Mail message by default) and copy them to the Notes app. Luckily I only had about 30. It would be a painstaking process for someone with too many more than that.

Hope that helps!

"new iTunes removes the option to sync Notes."

I would like to keep my notes OFF of iCloud. In OSX Lion, I was able to keep my iPhone and iPad in sync with my macbook's notes by syncing via itunes sync only.

That option appears to be gone now with mountain lion.

Am I correct in saying that the only way to keep an iphone/ipad/macbook notes in sync in mountain lion is by using icloud (or some other cloud based workaround)?

I was happy with doing local wired or wifi syncs to my latop, and will consider uninstalling and going back to Lion to keep that option.

Can you confirm?

Thanks all

Dooob

Apparently that's how it is, unless you want to store your notes on your own IMAP mail server. That's still there, but it's broken for some users (like me). Who knows if Apple will fix it or just remove it. i don't want to keep my sensitive info on iCloud, so it's important to me to see the IMAP Notes functionality fixed.

Very frustrating.

As per Jonathan Rayson's reply, the notes are in ~/Library/Mail/V2/IMAP-(my email address)/INBOX.mbox/Notes.mbox.

Given that the mbox has notes as .emlx files (buried several folders down), another method might be to convert those files (using emlx-to-mbox, as recommended by MacUpdate), and then import into Mail. (<opt>-click> when opening the app to get past Apple's new security feature.)