Scratch my last comment, about 15 minutes later it all went to **** again. The below fix helped, but I’m still noticing a lack of sync from Mac Notes app > iCloud > iOS device.
But I did manage to partially improve the issue, although it was a pain. I noticed when I logged into iCloud Notes that not all of the notes were making it into iCloud. So essentially I had three different sync versions of notes: 1. iPhone 2. Mac 3. iCloud Notes. At some point, I must have made too many conflicting changes and iCloud just couldn’t sort it all out.
So what I did that worked for me and has been working well for more than half the day now was basically migrate all notes to offline account, dump iCloud from syncing all notes and then resend fresh on all devices….as follows::
- Luckily all (or at least most) of the notes I needed were on my Mac Notes app
- Go into Mac Notes > Preferences > check the box “Enable the On My Mac account”
- Drag and drop all iCloud notes into the “On My Mac” account area
- I recommend doing this in chunks as Notes would crash if I did more than a hundred or so notes at once.
- There is a similar feature on the iOS devices in Settings > Notes > toggle the “‘On my iPhone’ Account” setting > go into Notes on iOS device > make a copy of all folders you want to backup to the device under the “On My iPhone” account area > go into the folder to sync > click “Edit” > select all notes to migrate > click “Move To…” > select the copied folder to move notes to > do this for all folders/notes
- Once everything is loaded onto your offline account then you can go over to iCloud online (https://www.icloud.com/#notes2) and make sure all of the notes are DELETED out of iCloud online. At this point you should have all notes backed up to your offline Notes section so even if the iCloud sync hasn’t finished migrating the notes you just moved it won’t matter.
- There are two ways to do this I recommend the first option below, but both work:
- Go onto your iOS device > Settings > click on your name banner at top > click > iCloud > Manage Storage > Notes > “Delete Data”
- Delete individual notes from iCloud online — there is no way to do this in bulk, fastest way I found was to select the first note in a folder and hit the “delete” key over and over until all notes are deleted (doing this from my Mac). Make sure to delete all of the notes in the Recently Deleted folder as well.
- Once all notes are deleted from iCloud you need to unsync ALL devices from iCloud individual via your account setting in each device.
- Now setup iCloud again on all devices and make sure you have Notes sync toggled on for each account you want
- Turn on background app refresh on iOS devices to ensure syncing stays up-to-date
- Go into all Notes app on all devices and ensure they have no notes from iCloud account
- Slowly (I mean slowly, as in a few dozen notes at a time) drag and drop or use the “Move” feature mentioned above on iOS to migrate notes back into iCloud. You can do this by folder as well, just be sure not to move too many notes at once or the app will overload iCloud and either crash or create new sync issues.
My Notes apps run faster on all devices, but still noticing some notes are slow to sync but all-in-all much better than before
