Duplicate notes? Notes not syncing?

I found a fix

I was having major issues with the Notes app in the new Mountain Lion update. Here are the problems I was having:

1. Notes was displaying two iCloud accounts when I only have one.
2. Notes on Mac were not pushing to iOS devices.
3. Notes on Mac were duplicating over and over.

Tip: I would back up any notes that are important to you before attempting this. I didn't lose anything but you never know.

First, close the Notes app and open the Mail app. We are going to fix the duplicate iCloud accounts. You would think going to System Preferences would fix this but it's actually in the Mail app. I went to Mail > Preferences > Accounts. In this list there were two iCloud accounts which were actually the same account. I kept the iCloud account with my email address as the description and deleted the account the said "iCloud" in description.

After that you can close mail preferences. Then along the top settings in Mail click "Mailbox" and then "Rebuild". This re-syncs your email accounts.

Close the Mail app.

Now we are going to fix the duplicating notes issue. I found this solution on another thread(https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4137558?start=0&tstart=0). This person actually called Apple and was told to follow these steps:

I'm posting this to confirm that the procedure described by Talkingpenguin above does work. I've used it on several systems already, and each one now has well-behaving Notes and no new problems that I've been able to discover.

I also have a few notes to add:

1- I didn't have multiple iCloud accounts showing within Mail. I still performed the Rebuild command (be sure no mailboxes are selected when you do this) and then quit out of Mail.

2- I doubt that all those caches really need to be deleted. Probably just those related to iCloud, Mail, and Notes. But it shouldn't hurt anything to delete them all, and certainly easier than hunting just for those specific caches.

3- It is important to restart the computer as soon as possible after moving them to the Trash and to then empty the Trash after the restart is complete.

4- Note that Containers is inside the user's Library folder; you won't find it in the Finder's Go menu as seems to be implied by Talkingpenguin's instructions.

Thanks, TP! Your efforts will save a lot of people a lot of annoyance. If they find this thread...

Thank you very much Talkingpengwin, your solution fixes the problem perfectly. If anyone is having this problem as well I will suggest to follow Talkingpengwin's step by step instructions, it works perfectly. Thanks again !!

Your solution works perfectly thank you for helping and posting this.

Glad I could help, and I'm glad it's fixed 🙂

Like you said, you probably don't need to delete all of those caches but I figured it wouldn't hurt anything to do it. Easier too.

Good note about not having any mailboxes selected when you rebuild.

I had to go into Mail Preferences to see two iCloud accounts. Once I removed the duplicate I then only had one iCloud account in notes.

Initially, I upgraded from Lion to ML and my notes worked fine. I just did a clean install to try something else and I suddenly couldn't sync my notes. I didn't some poking around and found a solution that seems a bit loopy but it worked.

This is what I did:

Go into System Preferences

Go into iCloud

Uncheck Notes

Go back into System Preferences

Select Mail, Contacts, & Calendars

Select iCloud

Put a check in Notes

Select your regular Mail Account (username@yourprovider.com)

Put a check in Notes

Go back to System Preferences

Select iCloud

Uncheck Notes

Basically, this unchecks the iCloud in Mail that you previously put a check in. But this seemed to be the only method that worked for me. I think it's a bug with the way Notes are synced.

In the end, Notes in both the main iCloud and in the Mail iCloud account are unticked and the Notes in the personal Mail (username@yourprovider.com) is the only one left with a check, but just unchecking the others and only checking the one in your personal mail account doesn't seem to work. The 'jumping through hoops' method seems to be the way to go about it.

Hope this helps.

Oh snap...kreme, this worked for me. I stopped at when you said to select you regular mail since I'm only using notes in iCloud. But now I don't have two iCloud acounts on the left plane with dup notes. Now I just want to make sure things are syncing to my devices just to make sure.

Thanks.

If anyone is still experiencing duplicate notes after fixing iCloud's settings, your duplicates may be stored on your email account in a notes folder (or Notes label for Gmail). Since Apple removed notes from the mail app, to access the notes you'll need to log on through your email provider's website.

For every note, the original should have some difference that allows it to stand out from its duplicates. In my case (Gmail), all of the notes had the Notes label while the originals had both the Notes and Inbox label. I was able to isolate the notes without the Inbox label to bulk delete the duplicates. This cleared most of the duplicates for me. If anyone would like I can go into a step-by-step process how to go about this.

Cheers.

I have a related, but different problem (and have not tried the talkingpenguin solution yet). I don't use iCloud for notes sync at all, only for Safari and Find My Mac at this point (and iTunes Match -- another story) -- I'm a slow adopter of everthing iCloud.

What I do have is the Notes box checked on my Gmail account on all of my devices (iMac, MBP Retina, new iPad, iPhone). I discovered that two of my notes had duplicate problems. One had about 11 copies but 10 of the 11 were identical and out of date (i.e. contained only the first line of text). The other note had two identical copies. "Be careful what you delete to clean things up." I told myself.

I'm very sorry, but I deleted the dups and honestly can't say with certainty what IOS or MAC OS Mtn Lion system displayed the dups (the apps look so similar and I wasn't being careful at the time -- not very scientific on my part). All this was before finding this thread.

I started using Notes apps across devices in a big way for a project I started last week, and I also received my new MBP Retina and upgraded my iMac and MBP to Mtn Lion the same week. That many changes confused the problem and confused me.

So, either I have a different problem, or there is a basic notes sync problem whether you sync via iCloud or some other IMAP account, GMAIL in my case.

I will be watching my systems this week to see if duplicates recur, and will have a more precise description, if and when they do.

I did all of the rebuilding, restarting, trashing the caches, etc.

I found nothing had changed.

Then I read the follow-up post that said the Containers was ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes. I deleted that folder while Notes was not running, emptied the trash, launched Notes, and it was all working perfectly again.

So that's likely the solution, not the caches, rebuilds, etc.

Thanks.

I just tested this and, yup, that's all it takes. Good to know; it will be much simpler and faster (no restart required) to repair additional glitchy systems going forward.

I did as you said and it immediately fixed the issue of seeing two identical iCloud accounts. So great. Then there were still some duplicates, of which I deleted the older dated ones. So that solved it all. Thanks for everybody's advice!

NOTE: Rebuilding the mailbox will force you to re-download all the messages you got in your inbox, especially if you handle several GMAIL accounts, that will take a GOOD quantity of time.

Also, clearing the cache, expect some micro-delay while launching the iCloud-related apps...