Do NOT use Apple's Notes on iCloud for anything you can't afford to lose

[gsxrken]

I am removing my entire under dash harness due to a meltdown and had taken several hundred photos and used the voice-to-text Siri feature to talk into my iphone and had created PAGES of notes into the Notes application. Today I went to continue and MY NOTE IS GONE. Photos still there but all my "red wire, white stripe goes to terminal on top left" etc type notes is gone gone gone.

If you use iCloud to store your notes, and you delete a note (or your device somehow deletes a note), you can't get it back. And i just got back from hours with Genius Bar, Apple Care chat and phone support only to learn they can't get it back either.

You would think a restore from iCloud backup would bring back the note, but it doesn't. Apple admits that Notes are handled different somehow, and can't be restored from the cloud. When a note is deleted from one device, that delete goes up to the cloud and the cloud then synchs up with your other devices and deletes the note on them, too. You can try restoring your ipad or iPhone from backups, and I did, but it doesn't restore the note. The irony- I was using the cloud for backup safety... and if I just used my phone's memory and not the cloud, I could have restored them from a previous backup.

Even my iMac desktop, which does a daily backup to the Time Machine Airport Express, doesn't back up the notes on the computer... because they're not really on the computer- they're on the cloud.

Until they aren't.

[dad911]

My iPhone notes backup to gmail, along with emails, contacts, and calendar.

[stomachmonkey]

I am probably one of the biggest Apple fan boys going and I won't touch iCloud with a 100 foot pole.

I run my own private cloud service on my own hardware.

The only one I trust.

[Crowbob]

I don't know a thing (well maybe one or two things) about all this interwebs stuff. That one to two things I do know is that there's no turning back and it's pretty scary.

What can ya' do, though?

[widgeon13]

I don't use iCloud. Don't trust what I can't access and won't pay for more than 5 GB of storage.

Sorry for your loss.

[wdfifteen]

I've never had a problem with dropbox or google drive, but iCloud - sheesh.
I backed up and synced my phone and iPad, all I wanted was my contacts,calendar, and notes.
It synced all my music in addition to what I wanted it to do and screwed up my contacts. I had a contact for my office phone and email and the name was "office." After the backup the name was "Holiday in the USA" I kid you not. It changed my name from "office" to "Holiday in the USA". It added a contact named Paula Pickle and I don't recognize the email or phone. I'm worried that I lost important contacts altogether.
Not touching iCloud with a 100 foot pole is good advice.

[kach22i]

This is a freighting story, sorry that you are going through this.

I'm considering upgrading to an AutoCad cloud based service, the only affordable one they offer.

No access on weekends, and they have AutoCad holidays (really).

How am I supposed to explain to clients that the project I just billed them thousands for has just disappeared in the cloud or they can't get prints first thing Monday morning?

I'm not liking this cloud stuff.

My buddy had an i-phone, they lost all of his contacts to the cloud when he upgraded to his current i-phone.

[mikester]

for basic notes I've rarely had an issue but for notes with images included I've had terrible luck. I don't do it anymore basically. I had a similar experience though a less critical subject but I Was excited to use notes in that way and when I went back to the note it was all messed up. It wasn't even messed up like 'normal' - some images were there and some were not and some text was missing and some was not.

I created the note on my Macbook and when I went to view it on other devices it wasn't complete. When I went back to my macbook it was again not complete. It's like it partially downloaded to one of my devices after being created and then got replaced on the original device with the old one. Then duplicates even started showing up. It was lame, plain notes only work fine though.

[sugarwood]

Ken, I'm in your area, so if you need to look at something for reference on my original and fully assembled '86, let me know.

[stomachmonkey]

I find the problem that most people have with cloud services is a basic misunderstanding of what they are and how they work.

People view them as back up / storage services when the reality is while most of them are just that they are also primarily sync services.

Now there is nothing wrong with sync services when they are used properly, as in the asset placed on the service should never be the only copy of the asset.

With services like dropbox and copy.com I find people screw up mostly when they move an asset into the local sync folder rather than place a copy of the asset in the local sync folder.

Admittedly while in a rush I've done that very thing which is why I now keep my local sync folders on a unique drive so any moving of assets results in a copy action by default.