Table content in locked Apple iCloud Note now suddenly disappeared

Question

Table content in locked Apple iCloud Note now suddenly disappeared

Devices and Software Versions

Device 1: iPhone 12 Mini running the latest software (iOS 16.3 20D47)
Device 2: MacBook Air M2 2022 running the latest software (Mac OS Ventura 13.2.1 22D68)
This has happened a year ago previously on different devices and software versions

App and Note Context

Apple Notes app
The note in question was an iCloud note that was biometrically locked with FaceID on iPhone and TouchID on Mac
The note had some text, then a table with a bunch of important information, then some more text
The table had 3 columns and about 50 rows
I accessed and used this locked note regularly every few days without issue, and it's always stayed nicely synced up-to-date across my MacBook and my iPhone

Problem

Three days ago, all is well with my locked note that had the table in it. Using smoothly across devices, etc. Since then, no major changes to any of the context or setup that I can recall.
Yesterday, I open up the note on my iPhone
Instead of showing the table with all the data in it, there was now just one empty cell. All my important table data was gone and it had collapsed to a single empty box. The text above and below the table was still present and the missing data was just the contents of the table.
Panicked to lose so much important data, I check my MacBook notes app and was sad to see that the loss of data had synced via regular iCloud syncing so that the table content was missing there as well
I call support and go to use the iCloud.com web portal to access my note... and the note is there as well, but it says that biometrically locked notes on iOS/Mac are unable to be accessed in the cloud for security reasons (so I can't see what's inside). Looking at the timestamp, though, it does seem like the missing data probably synced to the cloud there as well.

Others with the Same Problem

Seems like this has been a problem for hundreds of people for many years now:

Next Steps

Apple doesn't seem to have an internal bug ticket for this issue : ( I've spent >2 hours working with them to help them understand the problem and trying to get them to open a request for their engineering team to investigate. Let's hope they identify and resolve this bug!

[Link Edited by Moderator]

MacBook Air, macOS 13.2

Posted on Feb 17, 2023 10:22 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

lifeliberthappiness Author

Level 1

7 points

Feb 17, 2023 10:51 AM in response to lifeliberthappiness

Additional context:

Tables in Other Notes

All my other notes appear normal through this episode. I have tables in a variety of other *unlocked* notes that still have their content in them. I don't have any other locked notes with tables, though, so I can't tell if the issue was limited to just that one note or if it happens across all locked notes with tables. One of the other people experiencing this bug, though, said that multiple notes lost their table data at once:

Apple Notes Content in Tables Has Disappe… - Apple Community

The same thing has happened to me today. Two notes, both with loads of information in tables, have had their tables wiped! This is not good and looks like a definite bug in the NOTES APP

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Answer 2

_djm_

Level 1

8 points

Mar 12, 2023 01:37 AM in response to lifeliberthappiness

I just noticed this happen to me when, on the Mac, I changed the locked note password from using the device PIN to a separate password.

You could see if refreshing each locked note with the new password and then losing data in tables!

It's either replaced tables with one blank cell, or removing some data from some cells but not others (usually the cells with a password in it unfortunately.

This is rubbish — I hope you managed to get somewhere with this or get your data back another way.

Luckily I had an iPad that I quickly put into Airplane mode in time and stopped it syncing the deleted data so I can see what's been lost.

Fingers-crossed I have separate backups of the data on the Mac with Backblaze, so I should be able to restore all the data (buried within Group Containers) — and I'm not sure if Time Machine backs this up too — but I don't trust Notes at all anymore.

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Table content in locked Apple iCloud Note now suddenly disappeared

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