In terms of exporting handwritten notes in iOS Iāve had good success with Nebo. Their handwriting recognition is fantastic even with my scrawl. The only thing is that there is no export (of the OCRd text layer) to md, but only txt. I mostly write in markdown so as an in between solution I push all my OCRd handwritten notes as txt to Drafts, and from there on either to Obsidian or to Devonthink. Iām very close to not carrying analogue notebooks at all anymore. This circumvents any syncing problems entirely, too. But if you are a heavy user then the multiple steps may become tedious.
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I just discovered one advantage of using Upnote. I recently start playing around in the Linux world, totally a newbie there. One thing that I am familiar and can sync my notes across many platforms is Upnote. I use the Upnote web clipper on Firefox on a Debian box that I run my Home Assistant server. Upnote is really the gem that I keep going back to
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I like that there is a physical on/off switch on the v2. I hated that membrane on the v1. That was the main driver for me.
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Sorry for the late replyā¦ I had intended to keep everything in Craft. However, as nice as Craft is, itās not a filing cabinet. You canāt search and find content inside attached files. Itās a great document creator, note editor, and has good integration with task managers etc. It also makes sharing of notes or entire spaces easy.
To solve the filing cabinet problem, I had considered just using Finder and something like Houdah for search. But having a tool like Notebooks sitting over the top of the folder structure just gives an additional layer of organisation with tags, good built in search etc. One can also annotate PDFs and add text notes alongside the files. I have sometimes exported entire archived project folders from Craft in PDF form and stored them for easy retrieval inside Notebooks (could just as easily use markdown too).
So I guess I see Craft as more of an editor and place to create notes, rather than a place for long term storage. I hope that helps.
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Finder and Houdahspot is a good solution. I used it for many years until I found EagleFiler. I agree that āhaving a tool ā¦ sitting over the top of the folder structure just gives an additional layer of organisationā that I appreciate having. We have a wealth of everything bucket apps to choose from today to solve what you call the āfiling cabinet problem.ā Iāve been having a blast reading about and looking into all of them. 
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The AN problem is still unresolved. Iām suppose to get another call from tech support today at 6pm my time. I was suppose to receive the call this morning at 8am. 
Question, what would happen if I deleted this library file?
Iām thinking maybe Notes would rebuild it upon relaunch and perhaps solve the issue? Notes works perfectly using iCloud.com and on all of my mobile devices. But, any change --new note, adding text, moving a note, etc-- that I make in Notes on my MBP do not upload to iCloud and thus do not sync to my mobile devices.
Can you do a quick Time Machine or other backup, delete, rebuild and see?
Good luck!
I have everything backed up but Iām supposed to have a call with a senior engineer in a few hours. It is probably prudent for me to ask him/her before proceeding. 
Or you could do it now and be all āI guess I know more then yāallā on the call, like Ron Swanson at the hardware store.
Ok, maybe donāt do that.
That would be awesome. Of course, if everything blows up as a result, then I would have to say that that was a very dumb idea.
This one made me laugh, the vegan section.
Do not follow me on this, but just to offer my own experience on this issue.
The Apple Sr. Support Engineer did have me delete a file, and I think it was this one. I cannot remember whether that aided the solution or not, but it did not make anything worse. Again, Iām not advising you to do this. Just remembering fondly from my time dealing with this. Maybe if I gave you my case number for my issue they might be able to help you quicker? Ask the engineer next time you speak to the support engineer, if itās helpful to have. If so, private message me and Iāll send you the case number. Hopefully, I can track it down w/o too much difficulty.
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Two things that I tried while I was working on my problem. You may have done these and discussed them above, so apologies if I missed it.
One test I did was to create a brand new user account on my Mac, associate my Apple ID with it, and tested to see if it would sync.
The other one to try is to take the ācanonicalā version of your complete Apple Notes database, letās say thatās on your iPad, and move all the notes into the āon my iPadā database. Then, wait until Notes app on icloud dot com shows zero notes. Then move them back into the icloud account and see if that gets your sync working again.
How many languages can you say ācolossal painā in?
Iāll reiterateāfor whatever this is worthāsince my account was fixed I have never had a syncing problem again and itās bee probably four years. (I think mine happened in 2018.)
Do you think it would be a good idea to turn off iCloud sync before you delete any files?
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A bunch of that time was waiting on calls from Apple. My favourite time was when I discovered the guy I was waiting for a call from had left Apple and not handed over my case. A close second was when I (more than once) received an email saying āAs you did not answer our callsā¦ā when I never received said calls. I later learned from a Senior Advisor that there was a āknown problemā calling overseas from the US where the (Apple) caller would hear the phone ringing but there was no actual connection.
Yupā¦ their processes are just as messed up as iCloud itself.
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@Bmosbacker not that I am trying to be an enabler, but NotePlan has just released an update that includes quarterly and yearly plans, and it seems like it would work well with your 5 year strategy-mapping question a while back:
Re your apple notes issue, your issue is more complex than this, but worth also bearing in mind Iāve been getting repeated domain errors from CloudKit for a few days now and stuff is struggling to sync, and elsewhere online and in here people have reported similar issues. Apple clearly have a system-wide sync issue at the moment, which I assume theyāre merrily ignoring because theyāve tried the old "turn it off and on againā trick and itās not fixed it 
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I just started making use of NotePlanās new Weekly Note, which has been available for about five months, and here come Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly Notes! (The Daily Note will, of course, continue to be my main focus.)
In my experience, whatever problems CloudKit has, they are nothing compared to iCloud Drive. I occasionally get a popup saying CloudKit could not be reached. When I imagine how many millions of users and apps must be hitting the CloudKit servers, Iām not surprised that every last request cannot always be handled instantaneously.
Iāve had a busy morning 
Iād actually already āfudgedā some monthly notes for next year as I want to build a dedicated monthly work review into my work, but having the native function within the app is way better so Iāve spent the morning moving my version into the new native section. Iām not sure about the yearly note so havenāt enabled that yet (I donāt track annual work goals at present, and use a paper planner for personal goals).
Noteplan just keeps getting more interesting, do you manage GTD contexts/lists in it as well?
The video Eduard did with a user showing his Annual/Quarterly/Weekly/Daily OKR process with noteplan gives a nice insight into how to use this feature (although the user was doing it pre the feature being baked in)
Did the tech help you finish it? Did deleting the file work? Have you abandoned apple notes for HyperCard running in a virtual machine?
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Thereās a review plugin as well that runs through a āchecklistā of all your open projects and prompts you to look at them. I donāt use it though.
I donāt really follow GTD (I half-implemented it so you will recognise some bits), so Iām not sure I can answer your question, but hereās my view in the iPadOS app (as of today with the new update for monthly and quarterly notes - Iāve not enabled the yearly note):
Iāve scrubbed out the folder names but thatās just because theyāre employer things. I think this might be a bit like contexts in GTD. I have 6 main areas of focus for my job, so I have 6 folders (the numbering is arbitrary, but I follow the same folder structure everywhere for work stuff so it matches).
I mostly live in the daily and weekly note, which is a plain text file for each day/week. I keep most tasks, comments etc in these daily and weekly notes.
If a project is getting big, is going to take weeks to complete, is an ongoing area of focus or is generally just giving me a bit of a headache, I usually create a separate note for it, and I file these in the relevant folder. E.g. in folder 03 you can see I have 4 separate notes at the moment. I add specific tasks to those, but also thoughts, comments, links. I very much prefer having my notes alongside the tasks.
I also keep some separate notes that are outside my folder structure. You can see Iād made my own monthly notes before the new update. These are for months already gone, Iāve not removed them yet because they still have open tasks in them - itās on my to-do list to move them this week.
Iāve also got a temporary Christmas list (I will delete soon!), a list of tasks that are low priority for when Iām tired, a list of things I need to think about that are not tasks [yet] (these are recorded in their note as bullet points not tasks, so that they donāt show up as an open task), and a āmaster listā and ārunning task listā. These are the same thing, Iām just in the process of switching from the ārunning listā to the āmasterlistā this week so I will delete the running list soon. I use that file to store undated tasks that arenāt related to a project but that I donāt yet want in a daily or weekly plan. Itās become a bit of a dumping ground so Iāve made a new note, added some structure and am Iām clearing it out.
I keep the folders closed when not in use, but thatās just a personal preference. Itās easy to review as I can just open the relevant folder and look at the individual project notes.
I donāt have anything in here that isnāt active, usually (I either delete a note if it has nothing useful in it, or I file it in DevonThink when finished - as long as you move the file out of the NotePlan folder, it will no longer show in NotePlan).
You can see I also keeps folder of process docs. These are just for a couple of recurring tasks I do at least once a month and need to follow. I donāt use NotePlan for PKM, but for tasks that have a āscriptā I think it makes more sense to store the script with my tasks rather than in another app.
NotePlan does also have @ and # tagging, but I donāt use either so canāt comment on it. They do work though as when I copy stuff out of Slack sometimes it immediately recognises the @ or # included!
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