Apple Notes iCloud syncing Catalina/iOS 13

I got so frustrated that I spent most of Friday evening and early Saturday morning to transferring Apple Notes to Notability. Notability syncs immediately and perfectly. I keep PDFs and documents for long term storage such as receipts, manuals, tax papers etc., in DEVONthink. It is a shame that a third party app syncs more reliability in iCloud than Apple’s native app.

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Amen Mr. Bmosbacker!

I’m downloading now. I’ll post an update. IF it works, I have a dilemma. I just spent Friday evening and early Saturday morning copying all of my Apple Notes to Notability. Even if the update works, I’m not sure I trust Apple Notes to stay in sync reliability whereas Notability syncs every time and perfectly across all devices. Still waiting for all of my tech to save me time! :rofl:

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I’m sorry to say that the 13.2 update did not fix Apple Notes syncing. After updating I deselected and reselected Apple Notes in settings on iOS devices and in system preferences on the MBP as an extra effort to reset everything.

I then created two notes on the MBP–one text only, one with a PDF. Neither have synced from the MBP to iCloud and consequently not to my iOS devices. It has been about an hour. They may eventually sync but this performance is not acceptable.

I tried the same approach with Notability; I created the exact same two notes. They both synced to my iOS devices is less than a minute.

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I’ve spot checked some of my “known problem notes” and there has been some progress. Not with everything and not completely. I’m hopeful that the sync errors have been resolved and that everything will be restored over the next few days. Keep you posted with my observations.

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Most of the issues seem to be gone post 13.2 FWIW. Obviously it’s just me, so would love to hear from others. I want to use Notes as the features are more than enough and being on MacOS/iOS it is just there. Similar to reminders with iOS 13, it’s now enough to keep me.

I’m on 13.2 on iphone and ipad and Catalina 10.15.1 on Mac and all 3 devices have different notes on them - none will sync to the other :-/

If I create the note on the web at icloud.com then it syncs and can be edited on other devices - those edits sync

It’s a mess - I can’t use it.

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Yes, and I would have thought that by now it would be fixed. I gave up and moved to Notability. Serendipitously I discovered that Notability is far better for annotating a PDF attached to a note so I’m actually glad I was forced to switch. :slight_smile:

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Same issue. Engineering took logs three weeks ago. Heard nothing so I’m chasing weekly and they aren’t getting back to me. Also started having sync issues with Reminders unfortunately

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imho notability is a whole other thing (and I really like Goodnotes for the things I’d be likely to find notability to be best for)

I’ve gone back to using Evernote for ad hoc notes (I was already still using it for long-term-external-brain notes anyway)

I might look at Agenda

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Uuummmmm. I gotta check into Notability!

I just tested the simplest aspect. Created a text only note in Catalina 10.15.1 and it went perfectly to my other Mac (Catalina), iPad & iPhone (13.2

I’m not getting anywhere with Apple tech support either. In fact, yesterday, my rep was going to take more logs, the call somehow dropped and the tech support rep who “owns” my case never even called back–even though she confirmed my phone number at the start of the call.

I have not been using Reminders, so I have no comment on that.

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I have no issues with Reminders or Mail. Tech., support suggested that I nuke and pave (my words) my Mac to factory settings and reinstall everything to solve the problem. That is not a solution. :frowning:

I use Apple Notes and Notability for notes because I digitally hand write about 70% of my notes. I don’t use those apps., for storage; I use DEVONthink for that.

There are a lot of YouTube videos comparing various note taking apps.

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Thanks! Gonna look right now. :running_man:t2:‍♂:running_man:t2:‍♂

When I found a problem that I couldn’t fix, before I would “nuke and pave” the machine, I would set up a second user account for testing. If the problem didn’t exist in the test account, backing up, then deleting and selectively restoring the problem account almost always fixed the problem.

However, in this case, the source of the problem likely originated in Cupertino.

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Since our shared grocery shopping list in Apple Notes still takes at least 4 days to sync my wife and me left Apple Notes and are now happy using Google Keep for our shared grocery shopping list.

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The most frustrating aspect of this whole thing for me is that sometimes Notes sync works and sometimes it doesn’t. I just can’t trust it. I hate that in software. I’ve been having issues with Notes syncing for at least a couple of years but they’ve been much more common since the release of iOS 13 (I’m still on Mojave on my Mac).

Data synchronization in distributed systems was a research area for me in the 80s. That was over 30 years ago and even then there were lots of good solutions. Apple still can’t get it right? Sigh…

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