How to retrieve missing iPad notes after iCloud Sync

For anyone finding this in 2024, this just happened to me as well when trying to sync my mac notes. Absolutely terrible. I have lost notes from over a year and a half. Lesson learned in trusting apple software. To anyone else experiencing this, I am very sorry, this is truly egregious and poor software design.

SUPER FRUSTRATING. I got a new iPad. I wrote a few IMPORTANT notes on it. I noticed that they didn’t sync with my phone so I turned on note syncing on iPad. It synced over my notes from phone but deleted notes from IPad.

How do I get my iPad notes back?

I turned on iCloud sync for notes on my iPad when I realized it wasn't on. Like others, all of my iPhone notes showed up on my iPad, but my iPad notes DISAPPEARED after syncing. I need those notes. How can I get them restored?

The same thing happened to me now. A few of my new notes weren't syncing to my iPhone or iCloud.com —only showing on my Mac app. I triple-checked, and they weren't in the On My Mac folder but in the iCloud account.

I turned off the sync and turned it back on, instead of having my new notes on each place, I lost them forever.

Apple, does this mean I will finally transfer everything to Notion and slowly start leaving your previously well-designed but now almost-terrible ecosystem?

This just happened to me as well and I’m devastated.

YEARS and YEARS of notes for my work and even about six years of rough writings for a book I had been working on amongst countless other important things that I check in on daily and add to. This is absolutely F*CKED.

They were synced to iCloud and Gmail and they’re nowhere to be found. No ‘recently deleted’ folders anywhere and my phone was just backed up a little over twenty four hours ago so in theory they should be SOMEWHERE.

Please help!!

I’m right there with you. I’m absolutely devastated, I wish I would’ve known previously that this is a common issue. I thought I was being smart by syncing my iPad to my iPhone, but I was so wrong :((( I scrolled through these comments and after seeing years of people bringing attention to this issue, I can’t believe it hasn’t been fixed yet. Like where are all of the missing notes at? It makes no sense!!!

I have an ipad and while I'm in the middle of writing a note the app will randomly crash, and everything I've written in at least the past hour disappears. I've had icloud sync on since I've had it and the issue persists. The part that remained on my ipad is still on my phone, but I'll exit the app and swipe out of it and it will be saved and then a few minutes later when the app crashes all the notes dissapear.

Today, March 3, 2025 I went into my Notes app on Apple IPad only to discover some of my important notes are gone. I’ve tried the suggested ways to retrieve them unsuccessfully. The only update to sync notes was done on my iPad. This shouldn’t delete my notes. Is there anything else I can do. HELP!!!

Um, SERIOUSLY? I just lost all my school notes from the last 3 weeks. This is not just inconvenient, it is really an emergency. I thought by syncing my notes to the cloud I would be backing them up (I was trying to do a good thing..), not just replacing them with notes from my other devices. I cannot believe this. WOW.

Apple notes app has completely wiped out my most recent notes, after synching across devices, I have been looking to migrate from Evernote and Goodnotes. I had painstakingly created note templates to streamline my work on my iPad, and now they’re gone—lost forever. This has happened twice in just two days! How hard is it for Apple to acknowledge that there’s a serious flaw here, it looks like it's been happening for years? Someone needs to get their act together and implement a fallback system —something that saves conflicted notes somewhere safe instead of just vanishing into thin air. This ongoing mess has shaken my trust completely in what should be the most reliable notes app, I'm loathe to create any new notes. It’s unacceptable.

THIS METHOD WORKS!!!

Just be sure that when you are erasing your data and settings that you skip the backup it tries to prompt, or you’re right back at square one!

I experienced this for my first time today with a very important note for me and I’ve been frantically trying to figure it out; best of luck to you, Apple Comm.

I have the same thing and done 4 calls with support and no luck. PLEASE CAN SOMEONE HELP ME!

Do you know what they did - because I am having the same problem.

Try receiving notifications for your iPad when you don't have an iPad!

Hi. I am struggling with the same thing. What does it mean "Internally do something to recover your note"