fixed : transfer “on my iPhone” notes to iCloud

Question :

I have notes on my iPhone (in the iOS Notes app), that I was expecting to show up on my Mac also (in the OSX Notes app) since I have both of them connected to iCloud, but only half of my notes seem to sync…

How can I get all of them to sync via iCloud ?

Answer :

When you are using iOS 7 (or iOS 8) and OSX 10.9 Mavericks (or OSX 10.10 Yosemite), you might have multiple accounts that are syncing their notes to Notes, not only through iCloud, but though other IMAP eMail-accounts as well…

Your best option probably is to transfer all your notes to iCloud and then only use iCloud to sync notes…

Here’s how to do that :

1- on your iPhone (or iPad) open the Notes app, and click on “Accounts” ; in the next window you’ll see multiple accounts listed

2- then, on your Mac, open the Notes app, and go to View –> Show Folders List ; if you click that, a menu pane called “All Notes” will open at the left of the Notes-window ; check to see if all those accounts match the ones listed on your iPhone

3- if they match, proceed to step 4 ; if not, go to Notes –> Accounts, and the  “Internet Accounts” window from the System Preferences will open ; there, select the (eMail-) accounts of the missing accounts, an click them ; in the next window, make sure there’s a checkmark at “Notes” for each desired account

4- then, in the Notes.app in OSX, select each non-iCloud account from the menu on the left and click on “Notes” ; if any notes are listed there, select one of them and then type the CMD+A key-combo to select all of them and type the CMD+C key-combo to copy all

5- then, go to the iCloud Notes, and type the CMD+V key-combo to transfer these notes to iCloud

6- repeat this copy process for all accounts listed, until all notes are copied to iCloud

7- only when you’ve double-checked that all notes are now in iCloud (also), delete the ones in the other accounts (and/or disable the accounts on your Mac)

8- then, on your iPhone (where the Accounts pages of the Notes.app is still open), select “On My iPhone” and on the next page, click each note to open the note, and copy it into a new note (to do so, go to iCloud –> Notes ; then create a new note  by clicking the +-button, and copy the info that new note) ; repeat this until all notes are now visible in iCloud –> Notes

9- Now, check on your Mac and iPhone, to make sure that all messages are now in the iCloud account

that should be it…

enjoy !

 

Advertisement

2 thoughts on “fixed : transfer “on my iPhone” notes to iCloud

  1. At Step #4 in Yosemite, I’m not seeing any of my old notes when I click on my Gmail account, so there’s nothing I can transfer over. Thus, I cannot continue. Any idea what I can do then?

    • @SustainedNote :

      Sorry to hear it doesn’t work for you yet.
      Your problem might have something to do with a bug in the way OSX connects to your Gmail account.
      I would suggest trying this :
      – go to System Preferences –> Internet Accounts
      – then select the Gmail-account from the list on the left
      – in the settings on the right, take away the checkmark in front of “Notes”
      – then exit the System Preferences
      – then open the Disk Utilities app
      – select your drive-partition (usually named “Macintosh HD”) on the left, and click on the “Repair Disk Premissions”-button
      – when that’s finished, restart your Mac
      – after logging into OSX, go to System Preferences –> Internet Accounts
      – then select the Gmail-account from the list on the left
      – in the settings on the right, put back the checkmark in front of “Notes”
      – then exit System Preferences
      – then open the Notes app, and check if your Gmail notes are show

      Hope this helps 😉

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.