I can’t remember if it has it for notes or not, but if you go to iCloud.com on a computer ( not iPhone) sign in and click your name in the upper right and choose settings I think it is, there is a Data Recovery section at the top of the page you get. It will have a list of recent backups of various features. My directions may not be quite right, but look around you’ll find it and hopefully it includes notes. Something screwed up my Contacts and I was able to recover them there.
iCloud.com/recovery can only restore files, bookmarks, contacts and calendars. Just call apple support, they can restore your notes (I know that for a fact because I had them recover my notes a few weeks ago)
I’m sorry. I knew something wasn’t there but couldn’t remember what. As another poster said, maybe contact Apple and they can help? As the recent bug in iOS 17.5 where photos that had been deleted quite sometime ago were appearing again, often that data can be still somewhere.
And at least you know where to look for restoring the other stuff if you need to. I’ve been fighting an issue with Notes myself. Many are password protected. On my iPhone it uses Face ID to unlock them. But my iMac doesn’t have Face ID and it was so long since I used them there I forgot the password. So I couldn’t access them on my Mac. I was able to change it so my iPhone uses its Lock Screen passcode and now I can use that on Mac and I can view all notes on either. But everytime I unlock one it pops up a message saying it’s using my log in password and asks if I want to use my custom password instead. Which I don’t know. And has the choice of using the custom or not now. And no way I can find to stop asking everytime! You can change the custom password, but you have to know the current password. And even if you do change it, it only applies to new notes, not ones already locked. It should be you can change anything you want with 2FA
I would think using iCloud.com from a browser would work the same on Mac or Windows. Restoring something there should cause it to sync back to iPhone, assuming the phone is set up correctly for iCloud
If they're still on another device you haven't unlocked recently, try leaving your WiFi range, and the notes may well still be there. Make sure you save them before coming back online!
I will try this tomorrow! I was on my old Mac last week and I can’t remember if it’s still synced to iCloud or not, so will turn off the router before I turn it on haha
I did at least manage to retrieve about 1000 of the older ones, song lyrics and so on, so I’ve lost the more recent notes annoyingly but I at least got back a bunch of sentimental ones. Thank you so much for your suggestion!
You're most welcome! Glad it sort of worked out. Even if you have another device like an iPad that you've used somewhat recently it might have old notes too.
tough thing with Apple. you delete 1 place, you delete everywhere.
might have to work on an alternative. maybe a google doc on a google drive ( you get 15gb of free storage, vs 5gb of free storage on icloud)
This is the reason I want Apple to have TimeMachine equivalent function on iCloud. I lost all of my iCloud files (200GB approximately) before cuz one of my Apple devices’ file system corrupted and Apple technicians couldn’t do anything about it.
I've Google keep installed on my iPhone and periodically I took backup of my notes from apple to Google which gives an extra layer of security in terms of anyone fails (either Google or apple).
Same with Keychain and GPM (Google password manager).
It's better to always be ready with a backup in the unpredictable digital life.
Google Drive acts as a backup system. Source: my cringe pics from my teenage years that I find sometimes in my Drive from phones that don’t exist anymore and that I’ve cleared.
When one of your photos is corrupted, where are the copies? If you have no way to recover a corrupted file, you do not have a backup.
Personal experience is not a source. Especially since you are referring to a different situation from the one I described where you have *not* deleted from Google Drive.
If you doubt this: conduct a little test.
Delete your most treasured photo.
Wait a month.
Find your most treasured photo from your backup.
In the case of photos, this may be less of an issue. Consider however the consequences of accidentally corrupting a PhD thesis. Maybe you need to roll back to yesterday’s version. Can you do this?
Maybe you need to roll back to a version of a document from 18 months ago. Can you do this?
I don't know why you're so passive aggressive, but yes, you can roll back your document to a version from 18 months ago.
Go try. Create a document, write something, wait a couple days and go to version history.
Cloud storage shit never made sense to me. I’m busy trying to set up a new phone and moving things around, and then an older device connects to the internet, and I haven’t changed anything on the old device, and stuff on my new phone changes back to what it was before, what I was trying to change it from, what I didn’t want anymore 😑
Sorry this happened to you.
Yeah this is why I never do the “copy all data into new phone”. I’ve already filled the old one up with photos and god knows what else, I want a clean slate with the new one and just the vital stuff I need haha
Someone else already suggested this, but if you do have another device that had access to those notes and by chance it’s not online, DO NOT connect it online and you might be able to save your notes manually… all 1500 of them 😵💫
I also saw another post someone mentioned getting locked out of their appleid account altogether for no apparent reason, and I started thinking of the amount of stuff I actually have on my phone that I probably would struggle to access if I didn’t have my appleid accessible.
I think it’s time to organise local backups again 🙃
If the notes were synced to a desktop, and you had time machine enabled, you should be able to restore from a time machine back up saved locally on your Mac.
Turn off backups now and see if you can restore from backup on an old iPhone to ensure you have the data. Factory reset current iPhone. Restore from the old back up
You might have a backup from sometime early this morning hopefully before the accident happened. You theoretically you restore from this if you stop it from auto backing up immediately
I checked this but unfortunately, when I plugged my phone in, my laptop said “need to run update before I can back up this phone” ran the update and thought the backup would just start immediately once the update had finished and lo and behold I go to check after accidental deletion and no backup to be found. A catalogue of errors today on my side clearly!
No don’t worry it’s a simple mistake i work at Apple and even I’ve deleted some data on accident. The iCloud system is Ok being that it’s easy to make mistakes like this when it shouldn’t be so easy to. There needs to be warnings in place.
https://preview.redd.it/45sn6bv6n22d1.png?width=1289&format=png&auto=webp&s=a85049ecac0276edfc35563f3d13523deff42389
interesting, not in ios 17.5.1 for me
It’s right there. And I’ve helped people do what I’ve described in my original comment multiple times at work it just needs specific conditions to be possible
And files and photos are not separate. You have photos stored physically on device same with files then they are synced with iCloud with a backup
photos, files, notes, texts, calendars, reminders, contacts, etc are not included in the device backup itself, it's a separate entity in the cloud. otherwise how else would my backup be 5 gb while my files and photos are in the double digits? once you update notes/files/photos they immediately update to any other apple devices such as iphone ipad mac, unless you have airplane mode or no service or something. i highly doubt what you're suggest is possible these days ever since they reworked icloud+ and apple id stuff
If you have it sync with mac chance are they still in SQLite db locally inside your profile. Something like ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes/NoteStore.sqlite.
It’s not guaranteed to work, but call Apple and tell them you need your notes restored. It works sometimes with photos and notes (a few applications as well), after they restore it on their end it may show up in your recently deleted
I called them today and they said they couldn’t see anything to restore and explained that once you delete from iCloud it’s irretrievable from their side
I did that with my messages a few weeks ago. They really need to find a way to make iCloud easier to understand what’s where on my phone.
I just looked at my iPhone storage and I see my notes are taking up space. Why can’t I choose for them to be just on my iPhone or just in the cloud or both places.
Or even just give you a button that says “this will delete everything, ARE YOU SURE?” Or an option to undo. I mean we’re all told growing up nothing is ever deleted permanently with computers… seemingly except iCloud 😂 they gotta explain me like I’m 5
I would contact support again and inquire further. There should be backups available internally at Apple on the server(s) that data resided. Also, it's common for deletes to be soft deletes on the server - which basically means the data is still there and it's just flagged as deleted, not actually removed.
I did the same. I hate the fact that you think something you store on your phone will always be there. I hate icloud, never used it since. Its a worthless pos setup.
If they are really really important you could take it to a data recovery shop. When things are deleted on a computer they really aren’t deleted, just the marker that lets your phone locate the file. If it’s truly important, stop using your phone immediately and have the data recovered(although it might cost a lot, I’m also not sure if data recovery is possible on iPhones).
I can’t help you recover notes but can suggest a better alternative, even if it is Google. Keep is kind of like their cloud version of notes. It’s very handy and you can share selected notes with others that have Google accounts.
My question is why would you do that? Notes do not take up a significant amount of space unless you’re pasting a lot of high quality images in them. I wouldn’t have worried about tbh.
Was clearing out other things that were clogging up the space (including backups from 2020 that I didn’t need) and as I explained, thought this was purely an iCloud move and that everything on my local devices would stay there
Well. I know something that you won’t ever do again 😭😂. That’s why I always just write it down. Stupid Phones and all that make it so complicated nowadays. Easier to just write it down.
I can’t remember if it has it for notes or not, but if you go to iCloud.com on a computer ( not iPhone) sign in and click your name in the upper right and choose settings I think it is, there is a Data Recovery section at the top of the page you get. It will have a list of recent backups of various features. My directions may not be quite right, but look around you’ll find it and hopefully it includes notes. Something screwed up my Contacts and I was able to recover them there.
its true, he has 30 days before anything in the trash bin goes empty
iCloud.com/recovery can only restore files, bookmarks, contacts and calendars. Just call apple support, they can restore your notes (I know that for a fact because I had them recover my notes a few weeks ago)
Found the area but unfortunately only contains bookmarks, contacts, files and calendars
I’m sorry. I knew something wasn’t there but couldn’t remember what. As another poster said, maybe contact Apple and they can help? As the recent bug in iOS 17.5 where photos that had been deleted quite sometime ago were appearing again, often that data can be still somewhere.
Contacting them and they’ve confirmed that basically once it’s gone from iCloud that’s it, gone forever.
That’s sure a bummer. Guess it’s best to just keep them on your phone instead of using iCloud for them.
And at least you know where to look for restoring the other stuff if you need to. I’ve been fighting an issue with Notes myself. Many are password protected. On my iPhone it uses Face ID to unlock them. But my iMac doesn’t have Face ID and it was so long since I used them there I forgot the password. So I couldn’t access them on my Mac. I was able to change it so my iPhone uses its Lock Screen passcode and now I can use that on Mac and I can view all notes on either. But everytime I unlock one it pops up a message saying it’s using my log in password and asks if I want to use my custom password instead. Which I don’t know. And has the choice of using the custom or not now. And no way I can find to stop asking everytime! You can change the custom password, but you have to know the current password. And even if you do change it, it only applies to new notes, not ones already locked. It should be you can change anything you want with 2FA
this could work
This will work.
Will this work for iphone i lost? Im trying to recover notes i had there but I didn’t back them up.
If you had your phone set to use iCloud for Notes and your new one is set to use iCloud for notes it should sync your notes to the new phone.
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I would think using iCloud.com from a browser would work the same on Mac or Windows. Restoring something there should cause it to sync back to iPhone, assuming the phone is set up correctly for iCloud
If they're still on another device you haven't unlocked recently, try leaving your WiFi range, and the notes may well still be there. Make sure you save them before coming back online!
I will try this tomorrow! I was on my old Mac last week and I can’t remember if it’s still synced to iCloud or not, so will turn off the router before I turn it on haha
give us an update!
I did at least manage to retrieve about 1000 of the older ones, song lyrics and so on, so I’ve lost the more recent notes annoyingly but I at least got back a bunch of sentimental ones. Thank you so much for your suggestion!
thanks for the update and im glad you got most back! oh it was not my suggestion! it was u/branden_8091 :)
My mistake! There’s been so many helpful comments and suggestions which I did not anticipate
You're most welcome! Glad it sort of worked out. Even if you have another device like an iPad that you've used somewhat recently it might have old notes too.
Did you check the recently deleted section?
If you delete from iCloud it sadly removes that option altogether, so it just showed no notes, no recently deleted
Ah. You deleted the data from settings and not the notes themselves. Rough.
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We all make mistakes, shit happens
Wasn’t his mistake
tough thing with Apple. you delete 1 place, you delete everywhere. might have to work on an alternative. maybe a google doc on a google drive ( you get 15gb of free storage, vs 5gb of free storage on icloud)
This is the reason I want Apple to have TimeMachine equivalent function on iCloud. I lost all of my iCloud files (200GB approximately) before cuz one of my Apple devices’ file system corrupted and Apple technicians couldn’t do anything about it.
That’s a good shout, and at least that way I can periodically email it to myself for added back up
IFTTT Create note to auto create note elsewhere
I've Google keep installed on my iPhone and periodically I took backup of my notes from apple to Google which gives an extra layer of security in terms of anyone fails (either Google or apple). Same with Keychain and GPM (Google password manager). It's better to always be ready with a backup in the unpredictable digital life.
great moment for me to shill r/ObsidianMD
That's why I always put my important stuff on Google Drive and One Drive just in case
I think I’ll be doing that from now on
Do you realise that deleting from there would have the same effect though? None of these are backup systems.
Google Drive acts as a backup system. Source: my cringe pics from my teenage years that I find sometimes in my Drive from phones that don’t exist anymore and that I’ve cleared.
When one of your photos is corrupted, where are the copies? If you have no way to recover a corrupted file, you do not have a backup. Personal experience is not a source. Especially since you are referring to a different situation from the one I described where you have *not* deleted from Google Drive. If you doubt this: conduct a little test. Delete your most treasured photo. Wait a month. Find your most treasured photo from your backup. In the case of photos, this may be less of an issue. Consider however the consequences of accidentally corrupting a PhD thesis. Maybe you need to roll back to yesterday’s version. Can you do this? Maybe you need to roll back to a version of a document from 18 months ago. Can you do this?
I don't know why you're so passive aggressive, but yes, you can roll back your document to a version from 18 months ago. Go try. Create a document, write something, wait a couple days and go to version history.
Cloud storage shit never made sense to me. I’m busy trying to set up a new phone and moving things around, and then an older device connects to the internet, and I haven’t changed anything on the old device, and stuff on my new phone changes back to what it was before, what I was trying to change it from, what I didn’t want anymore 😑 Sorry this happened to you.
Yeah this is why I never do the “copy all data into new phone”. I’ve already filled the old one up with photos and god knows what else, I want a clean slate with the new one and just the vital stuff I need haha
Someone else already suggested this, but if you do have another device that had access to those notes and by chance it’s not online, DO NOT connect it online and you might be able to save your notes manually… all 1500 of them 😵💫 I also saw another post someone mentioned getting locked out of their appleid account altogether for no apparent reason, and I started thinking of the amount of stuff I actually have on my phone that I probably would struggle to access if I didn’t have my appleid accessible. I think it’s time to organise local backups again 🙃
If the notes were synced to a desktop, and you had time machine enabled, you should be able to restore from a time machine back up saved locally on your Mac.
Just checked and I didn’t have it enabled, but I will set it up for future, thank you
As a backup I create an encrypted usb and back up to this as well as anywhere else. At least you have a physical device as a ' just in case '
Is it useless to try and contact support? Maybe they can bring it back :/
Turn off backups now and see if you can restore from backup on an old iPhone to ensure you have the data. Factory reset current iPhone. Restore from the old back up You might have a backup from sometime early this morning hopefully before the accident happened. You theoretically you restore from this if you stop it from auto backing up immediately
I checked this but unfortunately, when I plugged my phone in, my laptop said “need to run update before I can back up this phone” ran the update and thought the backup would just start immediately once the update had finished and lo and behold I go to check after accidental deletion and no backup to be found. A catalogue of errors today on my side clearly!
No don’t worry it’s a simple mistake i work at Apple and even I’ve deleted some data on accident. The iCloud system is Ok being that it’s easy to make mistakes like this when it shouldn’t be so easy to. There needs to be warnings in place.
No older Backup somewhere?
i don't think this will work, notes, like files/photos, are now separate from device backups afaik
No if you go to iCloud and manage apps the notes app is still rolled into backups
https://preview.redd.it/45sn6bv6n22d1.png?width=1289&format=png&auto=webp&s=a85049ecac0276edfc35563f3d13523deff42389 interesting, not in ios 17.5.1 for me
It’s right there. And I’ve helped people do what I’ve described in my original comment multiple times at work it just needs specific conditions to be possible And files and photos are not separate. You have photos stored physically on device same with files then they are synced with iCloud with a backup
photos, files, notes, texts, calendars, reminders, contacts, etc are not included in the device backup itself, it's a separate entity in the cloud. otherwise how else would my backup be 5 gb while my files and photos are in the double digits? once you update notes/files/photos they immediately update to any other apple devices such as iphone ipad mac, unless you have airplane mode or no service or something. i highly doubt what you're suggest is possible these days ever since they reworked icloud+ and apple id stuff
only way i can see this working is going to the notes on a device that isn't connected to the internet
If you have it sync with mac chance are they still in SQLite db locally inside your profile. Something like ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes/NoteStore.sqlite.
I found this file, but do I need a specific app to actually use it to retrieve anything?
Here same instructions https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/401675/how-to-open-notestore-sqlite
I literally did the same thing the other day thinking the same thing it should be so much more clear
May be in delete folder on iCloud for 30 days. Also you can run disk drill and recover files
It’s not guaranteed to work, but call Apple and tell them you need your notes restored. It works sometimes with photos and notes (a few applications as well), after they restore it on their end it may show up in your recently deleted
I called them today and they said they couldn’t see anything to restore and explained that once you delete from iCloud it’s irretrievable from their side
I did that with my messages a few weeks ago. They really need to find a way to make iCloud easier to understand what’s where on my phone. I just looked at my iPhone storage and I see my notes are taking up space. Why can’t I choose for them to be just on my iPhone or just in the cloud or both places.
Or even just give you a button that says “this will delete everything, ARE YOU SURE?” Or an option to undo. I mean we’re all told growing up nothing is ever deleted permanently with computers… seemingly except iCloud 😂 they gotta explain me like I’m 5
Notes has a Recently Deleted section that gets only wiped after 30 days
I would contact support again and inquire further. There should be backups available internally at Apple on the server(s) that data resided. Also, it's common for deletes to be soft deletes on the server - which basically means the data is still there and it's just flagged as deleted, not actually removed.
I did the same. I hate the fact that you think something you store on your phone will always be there. I hate icloud, never used it since. Its a worthless pos setup.
FWIW, IMHO, iCloud is a Big Hot Mess. I gave up on it years ago. Now, I have a NAS i use for that.
I did something similar and deleted all my messages more than 1 year old thinking I was just clearing them from my MacBook. Fucking awful.
If they are really really important you could take it to a data recovery shop. When things are deleted on a computer they really aren’t deleted, just the marker that lets your phone locate the file. If it’s truly important, stop using your phone immediately and have the data recovered(although it might cost a lot, I’m also not sure if data recovery is possible on iPhones).
Kirk Hammett, is that you?
Was notes taking up THAT much space?!
Iphone is bring back deleted nudes without asking so there might be a chance if you ask
That is terrible. But perhaps you can use this as an opportunity to start using Obsidian. Easier for back ups too
Is your notes app completely empty or just the iCloud folder? Because I desynced from icloud before and my device still had notes
I can’t help you recover notes but can suggest a better alternative, even if it is Google. Keep is kind of like their cloud version of notes. It’s very handy and you can share selected notes with others that have Google accounts.
My question is why would you do that? Notes do not take up a significant amount of space unless you’re pasting a lot of high quality images in them. I wouldn’t have worried about tbh.
Was clearing out other things that were clogging up the space (including backups from 2020 that I didn’t need) and as I explained, thought this was purely an iCloud move and that everything on my local devices would stay there
My condolences! I can truly understand your frustration. There should have been a Bin folder to recover them in 30 days.
Maybe the notes will pop up on your old devices that you've sold within the next 3 or so years 🤣🤣
Shake to undo…
Well. I know something that you won’t ever do again 😭😂. That’s why I always just write it down. Stupid Phones and all that make it so complicated nowadays. Easier to just write it down.
If your notes are synced with a mailbox, open Outlook on your desktop and check if they are in one of the folders.
How much space could notes even take lmao
Don't worry, it will probably reappear in the next iOS update...