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deann555 Author

Level 1

7 points

Notes Lost After Turning on iCloud

I am currently using iOS 16 on an iPhone 11. I had over 1000 notes on my iphone and iCloud backup was not turned on. I turned iCloud backup on. Only 76 notes are now backed up to the cloud and the "On my Phone" folder in the notes app shows "0" notes on my device and 76 in iCloud. When I search my phone for key words from notes that I know should be there but aren't, I can see notes in the search results that are not in the iCloud folder. However, when I select the "search within app", the note is not there. There is also no "Recently Deleted" folder in my notes app. I have searched the community, but can't seem to find anything that is on point.

I also note that my iPhone storage shows that Notes is using 9GB of storage, but only 653KB is stored in the cloud.

iPhone 11

Posted on Dec 6, 2022 7:07 AM

Top-ranking reply

bruno75

Community Specialist

Posted on Dec 8, 2022 10:46 AM

Hey there deann555,

From the details you provided, it seems as if there's some confusion, and we'd like to clear things up for you prior to troubleshooting this.

Regarding enabling iCloud Backup, this will not affect Notes in any way as it only backs up your entire iPhone, which would include any notes. That being said, if you enable iCloud Notes, then it'll sync the notes on your iPhone with iCloud, and iCloud would then sync those same notes back to any device that has the same Apple ID signed in for iCloud(along with iCloud Notes being enabled on those devices).

To better understand what's happening, along with ruling out some possible causes, we'd like to confirm the following details:

Did you enable iCloud Notes in your iPhone that has the 1000+ notes? Keep in mind that with that many notes, along with the content saved within those notes, it can take some time to finish syncing with iCloud.
If you enabled iCloud Notes, did you see any progress with syncing, or even a status about syncing with iCloud anywhere in the Notes app currently?
If iCloud Notes is enabled, have you already checked on the iCloud website to see if any of your missing notes are showing there?
While this question also depends upon whether you enabled iCloud Notes(not iCloud Backup), have you tried the remaining steps in this link? Check out: If you're missing notes on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

Cheers!

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Notes Lost After Turning on iCloud

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