My notes are not syncing between Mac and iphone - I have tried every suggestion

I have tried all the suggestions. Rebooted both devices many times. Finally, trying the SAME thing, my notes are miraculously working. There is absolutely nothing I can attribute a solution to. It's a glitch with icloud. I am having similar problems trying to text non-iphone users from my MAC. I was "forced" to update operating systems and I have been having problems ever since. Wasted so much time on these issues. Thanks

I also lost my notes on my iphone but in icloud all is there. What I did was I went to settings and then Notes selected account which is Icloud and then toggled off Notes then rebooted my iphone. When it turned on I went back to the same path and then toggled it on and then relaunch Notes on my iphone and voila my icloud notes are loaded back.

Hope it helps.

What version of MacOS and Notes? You may need a different solution.

I have another solution for anyone having this issue in 2024/2025. This what worked for me, at first it wasn't so obvious, but it worked.

Open the Notes app on your phone > Theirs Two folders One at the top is named "iCloud" thats where you want all your notes written or forwarded from your "On my phone" if you want them sync with all your devices.

Then you have the next folder "On my iPhone" which is exactly what it says, all notes written on there are saved on your phone only.

Your notes on your Mac (desktop/Laptop) device can be configured as you wish by opening the Notes app and clicking > Note at the top of menu then clicking > Settings.

Ok, after trying many things, I guess found a solution.

First, the problem was very similar to the initial case, endless spinning synchronization icon and unreliable note numbers on various devices (Mac, iPad and iPhone).

The main reason was I guess, I had imported approximately 3.000 notes from Evernote as an ENEX file. The notes were successfully imported to Apple Notes on my MacBook Pro, successfully synchronised with iCloud and iPhone. But I had an endless sync icon on my iPad even after days..

What I did, I found the Exporter app from App Store which targets to export Apple notes of local folders as ".md" files with separate attachement folders. This app exported my whole library where ~10s of notes were "failed to export". After Exporter finished operation, it generates a log page where you can see the export failed note titles.

I found all these failed exports (many of them were notes with embedded TIFFs) and removed from Apple Notes, the iPad finished synchronization and all total number of notes on various devices were same.

Hope this small trick works for you.

THIS ALSO WORKED FOR ME!

I've been trying for AGES! My notes were syncing between my iPad and my iPhone 11, but at some point they stopped syncing with my Macbook.

Going into Notes > Notes > Accounts > Add Account > iCloud worked!

For me some are synced and some are not. This has just begun to be a problem recently. The MacBook Pro is on Sonoma 14.0. The iPhone (12 Pro Max) is on 16.6.1.

I depend on these remaining in sync, which they always have until recently.

WARNING: Do not attempt these steps unless you're willing to lose all the changes that haven't been synced! I signed out and signed back in via Notes>Accounts>icloud and sign in, as described by mwmom. It may have worked in terms of getting future changes synced, BUT it did not capture all the changes that had been made on my Macbook Pro for the last couple of weeks (since it stopped syncing)!! This is so bad, I'd made so many notes, and now they're gone.

For what it is worth, I have an older Mac and newer iPhone and newer iPad. Notes on the Mac is an older version of Notes compared to Notes on iPhone and iPad. It seems impossible to tell exactly what Notes version — not OS version - you have on each device BUT if one device is older, it stops some notes syncing across all devices. In my case if I create a note using Tags or tables on the iPad it does not sync -even between devices that could use Tags, because one device does not use Tags - in my case my old Mac. A message does pop up saying This note in not supported on some of your devices. It means not supported on ALL your devices and so won’t work on ANY device - that’s just ff’ing great, if you ask me. I’ll try to disconnect the Mac from all accounts used by Notes and only use Notes by logging into iCloud and see what that does. In the meantime, I’ll keep the notes in Notes very simple.

UPDATE using new features on new iPad, DOES sync on new iPhone. But not on older Mac - so I’ll browse to iCloud on the Mac to access Notes to see if the new features are syncing there.

I had this issue between my Macs

I had to use icloud to move my notes between macs

after logging into icloud and enabling syncing of notes they still weren't syncing between my macs

I realized that you need to manually move the notes on your laptop into icloud

to force the notes to upload quickly to icloud I had to do the following:

keep in mind though this gets rid of all the folder structure you had created in the notes on your laptop -_-

• create a new folder on the icloud section of the notes app - folder name used: Imported Notes
• select all notes that were on my mac - go to all notes on mac
• right click to move the notes on my mac to the newly created icloud folder: icloud > Imported Notes
• to keep your folder structure move each individual folder to the icloud section

all the notes on my mac that were created prior to logging into icloud were immediately uploaded to icloud and I was able to see them across my macs

I hope this helps someone out there that also didn't know this

sending you all resilience vibes as you get through these mac issues >.<

I just figured out that a note will not sync to iCloud if it begins with a number (i.e. if the title of the note begins with a number). Seems like it must begin with a letter. Strange.

To sync NOTES between the MacBook and iPhone, turn NOTES off and turn back on. NOTES will be synced.

I did this on all of my devices and lost all of my iPhone Notes. They have not yet re-synced, though my MacBooks have re-synced, but without the newer Notes that were on my iPhone.

There is no such path as there is no Accounts option under File in notes. Open Notes on your computer, go to File>Accounts (Does not exist)>icloud and sign in through that method.

Try creating new folder and add new notes, for me, it suddenly worked