Notes slow

That's what I'm saying. You shouldn't restore. Otherwise you'll back in the state you were before. There's no fix yet so why would you even try.

I chatted with Apple Support today.

The agent said seems to be an issue with large number of Notes and iCloud sync. He didn't have me fiddle with settings or anything based on the info I gave him. He was going to "forward my concern to his supervisor to provide feedback" to the iCloud team. Maybe if enough people complain to support it will be included in a future version (or maybe they are already working on it - one can only hope).

In the meantime I'll stick with a laggy Notes app. I don't really want to switch back to Evernote again.

OK so what I ended up doing was moving a large number of Notes (recipes) to a recipe management software. Then I moved another large number of Notes that are more reference-style material to my local iMac taking them out of iCloud.

That left me with 170 Notes that I access frequently, but I found that the slowness continued. Checking iCloud usage, the space used by Notes dropped from 1.1GB down to 500MB. There was no reason for the continued 500MB iCloud storage usage for such a small number of notes - seemed like a lot of garbage left behind in iCloud. The following final steps sped up Notes removing the laggy behaviour with iCloud - should keep me going until a fix is implemented:

1. Moved remaining 170 Notes in iCloud to a temporary Notes folder on my iMac.

2. Ensured that Notes were synced and cleared out on all my other devices.

3. Went to iCloud storage managemet and deleted all Notes data.

4. Let things sit as is. I left it alone until next morning. Probably only need a few minutes of waiting.

5. Copied the 170 Notes back to iCloud.

6. Allowed other devices to sync (this took a long time - some devices took 30 min before the sync process would start)

7. Went back to iCloud storage and Notes was then only using 65MB.

Thanks so much, finally fixed the issue!

Option B worked fine for me. Thanks for writing up the instructions.

I have been using Apple Notes for months now with a more limited selection of imported Evernote and newly created notes. On iCloud I have less than 200 notes (about 160 MB), and the remainder locally on iMac with about 1,000 notes. This setup works fine - fast response with no hanging or other odd behaviour.

Seems "best" solution is not to keep more than a few hundred notes on iCloud... at least for now.

followed your option B and looks like everything is working fine now!

Thanks a lot!

Ermanno