Need to restore iPhone NOTES that were not backed up.

August 22, 2014 3:28 PM

In trying to backup iPhone 4s NOTES onto iCloud I lost many of them. When I started the process my phone said I had four different NOTES accounts: "All Notes"; "From my PC"; "Gmail"; and "iCloud". It has lost the "From my PC" account and with it, many of my older notes. They are not on iCloud either.

My most recent iTunes backup was ancient and, unfortunately, iTunes backed my phone up since the NOTES were lost. Is there anything I can do to find the lost notes? Where would they have resided on my PC? (They aren't in my gmail folder called "Notes". There are only a few in there and they are old.)

Thanks for any suggestions you may have! I'm trying to upgrade to an iPhone 5 and wanted to save my NOTES first.

posted by ridingtheranges to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Have any of you tried ios-data-recover.com? I'm not sure it's safe to download and try it...
posted by ridingtheranges at 3:34 PM on August 22, 2014

What version of windows do you have? If it is Windows 7, put the following in your search bar: name:notes
When you have your c: drive open in windows explorer.

I would also suggest looking in your My Music folder especially the iTunes folder.
posted by soelo at 5:23 PM on August 22, 2014

I have Windows 8, but I'll try your suggestion anyway. Thanks.
posted by ridingtheranges at 5:41 PM on August 22, 2014

"From my PC" are notes which were synced via USB from Outlook, or whatever program you were using on the Windows machine to maintain notes. (i.e., it's not really an account)

You might look within that program on your Windows machine, and also set up your iCloud account on the Windows machine so you can copy from the local Notes store to the online account.
posted by tomierna at 8:12 AM on August 23, 2014