How can I recover my missing notes on Notes app?

Question

Level 1

4 points

How can I recover my missing notes on Notes app?

All of the notes in my phone that were linked to email addresses have disappeared!

I was literally typing a note, navigated to a different screen to check a date, and when I navigated back to the Notes app, all of my notes are gone! :'(

I'm not overly tech savvy and didn't realise that they weren't linked to iCloud. I'm not even sure which email there were linked to - I think it may be an old uni email from 10+ years ago that I no longer have access to.

I've Googled and tried the following:

updating iOS
hard restart
checking the notes settings and ensuring the email accounts have "notes" switched on
Upgraded iCloud storage in case it was a lack of storage issue

There's no recently deleted folder. It's like they've just evaporated into thin air!

I don't have an iCloud backups to restore to - I always just had the standard 5GB storage and have since upgraded to 200GB. But it's my understanding that it wouldn't help anyway as the only notes it would have would be those linked to iCloud.

Please help - all my babies Milestone important dates were saved in the Notes app :'(

I don't understand how they could just disappear in the middle of me using it :'(

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Missing Notes - please help! :'(

Posted on Aug 16, 2025 06:35 AM

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Answer 1

KiltedTim

Level 10

220,386 points

Aug 16, 2025 06:51 AM in response to jade_xo

You need to determine what cloud service they were synced with, assuming you were actually syncing them with the cloud...

Log into your accounts on the web and see if you can find them. If they were in iCloud, you should be able to find them in the notes web app at iCloud.com. If they were syncing with gmail, they will hopefully be in the all mail folder.

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Answer 2

jade_xo Author

Level 1

4 points

Aug 16, 2025 06:58 AM in response to KiltedTim

Thank's for you're response!

That's the issue; I'm almost certain they were saving under an old uni email from 10+ years ago that I'm not even sure would exist anymore. I have reached out to the university IT people with my details to see if they can help with a password reset so I can hopefully log in and see if I can track them down.

As I said, not tech savvy and didn't realise they were 'linked' to an email account - I just assumed they saved locally to the phone. I haven't had access to that email on my phone for many, many years now and haven't had any issues prior with notes disappearing.

If I had been deleting email accounts or something, I could understand why they would go with them. But the fact that they just disappeared while I was literally using the Notes app? It's gotta be some sort of glitch, surely.

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