Notes Disappearing!!

I just realized my some of my notes had disappeared. I checked my gmail, and as people have said I found a couple of notes since the Notes app had switched default account without me knowing about it. Mildly infuriating.

However, there were still some important notes missing.

This is an ugly way I found to get some of the information in the lost Notes back (in OSX):

1. Open Finder

2. Click "Go" in the top menu bar. Hold down the "option/alt" button (on your keyboard), and the option "Library" should appear in the drop down menu. Click "Library" (it's hidden by default)

3. Open Containers, then com.apple.Notes, then Data, then Library, then Notes

4. Here you should find a couple of files. As far as I can tell, this is where your Notes data is stored. Unfortunately, there are a lot of junk in here too (formatting info etc etc) (they aren't intended to be read this way), but if you really need the info of your lost notes it might be worth the treasure hunt.

5. Open them in textedit (right-click, open with, other, then choose textedit or your text editor of choice). Don't save any changes you make to these files!!! Actually, it might be best to "save as" to a different location just to be sure.

6. I found the most valuable info pretty close to the bottom of the "NotesV1.storedata-wal"-file. Don't forget you can hit Command+F to search.

Hope that helps!

Ps. It is insanely embarrasing that Apple can't figure out how to get a basic Notes app to work in a secure way. :-P

Thank you, Vetbullen. I did find some of my notes in there but they were so embedded in computer language that I could not realistically spend the time to extricate them. There are 735 pages to go through and one of the notes is repeated 6 times in the two hundred-something pages I looked through.

I see... I think a note might appearing many times because it has been autosaved a couple of times, but I'm not sure.

Some tips if you haven't given up might be to search with command+f if you're looking for something specific, as well as use "find and replace" on all the occurences of each computer lingo thingy and replace them with nothing (a good way of cleaning significantly faster) (do this in a copy of the file, or in the extracted text).

But yeah, the way I described above is definitely a messy way of doing it. I mostly wanted to extract some ideas for a comic I'm making, but that was just a few sentences.

Sorry I can't help you more than that!

Hey. Did exactly what you said with extremely high expectation since my disappeared notes were very important. Only to reach email tree and no icon for notes:-( *sobbing. Someone heeeelllpppp pleeease

I wonder if the guys at the Apple Store Genius Bar can help you. Have you performed a backup? You could restore your notes. There are also people that specialize in data recovery, if your notes are that important. Good luck.

Have you tried to restart the note app?

I noticed that when I reorganized my notes, some of the notes disappeared.

Instead of panicking, I just restarted the app and after a minute they just came back!

I would advice anyone who value their notes or spend alot of time to backup their stuff.

settings says my icloud account is default, so in that case where would the folder be?

I've had this problem in both Mavericks and Yosemite. This is the third time that I've lost information because of this garbage program, so I'm finally moving everything over to Evernote and never looking back. That's one more final straw for my desire to be an Apple consumer... I have had so many problems with everything I've gotten from them in the past few years, I can't imagine why I would ever want to buy another one of their products. So much for the days of "It just works". Couldn't be farther from the truth now.

Thanks to this thread, though, I was able to get back one rather lengthy note by opening that .wal file in text edit, so thank you so much Vetebullen!!

Just to say, Apple support advises that an upgrade or 2 back they stopped showing the Notes/To do in the sidebar to Mail, and now Notes is accessible as an app in your app folder... so move it from the app folder to your dock, and start to access Note/To do from the dock. And incidentally, I found all the notes I thought were lost in the upgrade to yosemite, just by opening that app. They were all there. Of course they were also accessible by using the path for library in Finder that some have mentioned.

I use a MacBook Air for school, and I had a list of books I've read so far this year in my Notes. I just tried to go to that list and add another one, but it's gone! And it's not like I can just remember the books off the top of my head, cause I'm at 33. I was incredibly mad at myself at first because I thought I had deleted it. Then I think back, and I realize that I had seen the list just before I turned iCloud on on my laptop. Now it's gone once iCloud is turned on. I hope this issue gets resolved soon, because that is a part of my grade

I prevent this issue since i noticed it happens with new notes, and they delete sometimes once you close the keyboard.

So what i do first is type two or three words only at the beginning and wait fifteen seconds.. if the note doesnt disappear, then it is safe to keep typing. It usually disappears during the first moments of creation of the note. If you wait for it to sync to icloud once you type three words, then you are mostly safe to continue.

Its because of Apple's updated icloud 'drive' which destroyed a **** of a lot of protocols from being executed. Some major international tech blogs lost all their cloud storage data when Apple upgraded such as the Mac Rumors website, because so many things were overlooked. Apple uses the consumer to help find issues instead of paying a large team of testers.

Its much cheaper to see how the public get infuriated by a bug, and to test all scenarios and component combinations with a vast array of different user situations, and so despite bad publicity when something fails, the benefits of the feedback outweigh the bad PR, and save millions on surveys.

Forum posts are where the Apple surveyors read their feedback without having to answer the consumer. Its a place where Apple can find out what is wrong, without having the workload of having to communicate with us.

This restored most of my lost note - thankyou!

I had to install some command line tools first when prompted and change the NotesV1.storedata to NotesV4.storedata which appears to be the new filename under Yosemite.

softwater wrote:

If you need to recover the text of any note that’s gone missing on your mac, try pasting this into Terminal.app. It’s all one line, so copy and paste it as a whole, then hit ‘return’:

cd ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes; strings NotesV1.storedata | grep body | open -f

The resulting TextEdit window can be searched or scrolled through for your missing text.

It works if you close Notes in a clean way, don't undo anything, and reopening it.

Give it 30 seconds and your note should reappear on the left.

It seems it's like if it goes to update the cloud and comes back.

Easy, the document goes in the cloud and disappears from the computer.

If you have an iPhone, check there, you should see it.

As you still cannot see it on your Mac, just close Notes and reopen it, then it will reappear after 10 seconds.