How to Recover Lost iPhone Notes
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If you've lost some notes from your iPhone, you may be feeling pretty unhappy right now. But with a bit of luck, you may find you can recover them from the backup iTunes makes of your phone each time you sync it.
To find out whether your notes are there, download the iPhone Backup Extractor.
Run it and see whether it finds any notes in your iPhone backup.
In this case, for example, it has found 44 notes:
If the iPhone Backup Extractor finds some notes in your backup, here are the simple steps to be able to read them again.
1. Extract the Notes
Click the number (in this example, "44" to extract the notes.
2. Choose a Destination Folder
Choose where you want the iPhone Backup Extractor to put the extracted notes. In this example we're creating a new folder called "Recovered Notes"
Click "OK" once you've selected the folder and your notes will be extracted.
3. Open the Folder
Open the folder you selected in step 2. You should see an HTML file for each note.
4. View a Recovered Note
Click on a file to view the recovered note.
Congratulations! You've now recovered your notes.
If you want to get your newly-recovered notes back onto your iPhone, I'm afraid that's harder. If you're a Mac user you may be able to copy and paste the notes into notes in Apple Mail and sync them back to your phone from there. If you're an Outlook user, there may be an equivalent.
If you find any good ways to get recovered notes back onto your iPhone, then please share them in the comments below.
Comments
It should be possible using a combination of MS Office OneNote (can be found within MSOffice suite) and MobileNoter (an iPhone App available via the iTunes App store. First, download and install MobileNoter from the iTunes App store to your iPhone. Follow all instructions from the App provider, including installing the sync software to your PC. Once done, "print your notes" to MS OneNote (to do this, click Print and then select "Send to OneNote" as your printer). This will "print" your note (s) inside OneNote (rather like printing to PDF, except printing into OneNote. Finally, sync your OneNote book to your iPhone using the sync button in MobileNoter(I use the WiFi sync mode) and there you have it, all your notes back on to your iPhone conveniently packaged into one structured Notes App (with numerous other formatting options which make Mobile Noter so much better than the basic iPhone notes app).
PS - fortunately, I've never had to do this myself yet...but there's no reason at all why it should nto easily work. I wanted my notes formatted "as is" on both by laptop and my iPhone. MS OneNote provides exactly that. The fact that you can send all your notes / emails / web pages / pdf's / spreadsheets etc etc to One Note makes it very convenient to use. It creates books of individual notes, which you can move around, edit, format, structure as you wish. MobileNoter is simply a great iPhone app designed to sync and work directly with One Note. Importantly, you can set up a password to protect entry to iPhone MobileNoter, making your notes more secure if they contain confidential info. When you launch MobileNoter, you have to enter your password before you can view your notes.
Getting them back on my IPAD was easy - emailed them to myself and copy/pasted them back into notes.