iCloud note disappeared after removing old iPhone from Apple Account

Hi,

arctoroz wrote:

My questions:

1. Could removing the device from my account have deleted the note?

No. Removing the device from your account has no effect on iCloud data on another device.

2. Can Apple recover the note from the iCloud servers?

Nope. Apple has no direct access to your iCloud account and everything is encrypted so could not even if they wanted to.

3. Would restoring the iPhone 13 Pro backup to another device help, or does the backup only contain locally stored notes?

Yes, the backup only contains items not already backed up or sycned to iCloud. If the note was being synced to iCloud then it would not have been part of the backup.

With that said, are you sure it was synced to iCloud?

Might it have been synced to another email account? Have you recently turned off or removed email accounts from your iPhone?

If it's not in Recently Deleted, it means it either been more than 30 days since it was deleted from a device or it wasn't actually deleted. Normally when this happens it's because the missing notes are synced to another email account not directly iCloud and if that email account is turned off or removed from the iPhone, the notes go with it.

This does not mean the note is entirely gone, it's likely still on the email account it was stored on.

Check your other email accounts for that particular note.

arctoroz wrote:

• Hello Community,

One important note has disappeared from my iCloud account and I need help recovering it.

About two months ago I moved from an iPhone 13 Pro to an iPhone 17 Pro. Everything transferred, and all notes showed normally on the new phone. A week ago I removed the old iPhone 13 Pro from my Apple Account in the new phone's settings, as it was no longer in use and the device had already been erased and sold. A couple of days went by and I noticed that one of my notes had disappeared. All other notes remain.

What I have already checked:

The note was in the iCloud folder (as all the others too), not stored locally on the device.

• There is no Recently Deleted folder on the phone or on icloud.com/notes.

• Search does not find the note, and it is not in the Gmail folder.

• The old iPhone 13 Pro's iCloud backup (3 months old) still exists.

My questions:

1. Could removing the device from my account have deleted the note?

2. Can Apple recover the note from the iCloud servers?

3. Would restoring the iPhone 13 Pro backup to another device help, or does the backup only contain locally stored notes?

Thank you for your help.

1. If you signed out of the icloud account that you use to sync that note then yes.
2. No, they can't.
3. Synced data is not part of the icloud backup.

Okay, thanks a lot. That’s more or less what I thought.

I haven't been able to find a "Recently Deleted" folder on my phone at all—only a "Recent Notes" folder, and the missing note isn't in there. And since the Gmail folder is also empty I think the case is thereby closed.

In the Notes App, tap on the < icon at the top left corner to see all Accounts and groups.

If something was deleted within the past 30 days, a Recently Deleted folder will appear within the group the Note was deleted from.

I have only iCloud and Gmail folders and none of them has Recently Deleted. Which proves I have not deleted any notes by myself lately, I suppose.

I feel 99% sure that that I've never had any other folders there either and even if I had tried to delete the whole On My Phone folder containing the note I assume the app would have asked me twice. I wonder what has happened?

I sure need to start making back-ups of the Notes somewhere else than iCloud.