Please help me recover a very important "deleted" note

BenEadir

Hi all,

Let me get this out of the way first. I'm an Android fanboy :eek: but not one of those nuts who thinks all things Apple are bad. I just like being able to mess around with ROM's etc.

Anyway, a very good friend of mine was keeping a note on his iPhone 5. It's basically a log of work done for a number of his customers. He normally sync's his notes to iTunes on his laptop but in July his laptop broke and between one thing and another he never got around to fixing/replacing it.

On Monday night he was updating this note with work done for the previous week and he must have accidentally deleted the note as it was 'missing' when he went to look for it yesterday.

In blind panic he went into a local phone repair shop who were unable to help him recover the note but, for some reason I can't fathom, decided to upgrade his iPhone 5 to iOS 7

I'm pretty good with phones, tablets, media players etc so he called me for help. I'm pretty sure that something like the DR Fone utility (http://www.drfone.org/iphone-data-recovery) would be worth trying in order to recover the binned note but my main concern is that the iOS 7 upgrade will have wiped any cache of deleted/binned items. Would that be true?

Given the above circumstances is there any way the deleted note can now be recovered?

I'd be VERY grateful for your input as I'm not familiar with the iOS system and don't want to make things worse!!!

Cheers,

Ben

Sad Professor

Did he have iCloud backup enabled?

BenEadir

Sad Professor wrote: »

Did he have iCloud backup enabled?

Hi Prof, thanks for reverting.

Yes iCloud was turned on but for some reason there are no notes backed up. I can see his contacts in iCloud all right but no notes. Is there a 'secret' bin somewhere in iCloud which might contain the deleted note or can iCloud restore the phone to the day before he deleted the note?

Ben

Sad Professor

If iCloud note syncing wasn’t enabled it’s possible he had notes set to sync with one of his non-Apple email accounts. You can check this by going into Mail settings and tapping into the email account(s). There’s a on/off switch for notes. In this case it’s possible the notes are stored on the email server of Google/Yahoo/whoever and he might be able to get them from there.

Otherwise you’ll probably have to go the recovery route.

EDIT: He should also make sure they aren’t still on the phone. When Apple's (crappy) notes app encounters a conflict with the server, it usually deletes the note from the main notes folder and throws it into the On My Phone section on the Accounts page of the Notes app.

BenEadir

You're the man Prof

I don't know why but all his notes were syncing to his Gmail account. I went in and could see all his notes EXCEPT the crucial one but when I did a search on Gmail for a term I knew was unique to the 'lost' note up it popped. I had already looked in the Bin so I don't think it was in there and I couldn't quite figure out what folder it was being stored in but I was quickly able to move it back into the Notes folder and star it as important.

Apparently there is a "serious amount of pints" coming my way. If only I could share them with you :rolleyes:

Thanks a lot, this is exactly why I love Boards

BTW, is there a simple note app on iTunes which has a real time/almost real time cloud sync function? I use EverNote on Android so something like that or something even simpler with less functionality would be perfect for this bloke.

Cheers,

Ben

Creamy Goodness

evernote is available on iOS. in fact was released first on iOS :pac:

BenEadir

Creamy Goodness wrote: »

evernote is available on iOS. in fact was released first on iOS :pac:

I guess someone has to beta test apps for us Android boys :P

Ben

massy086

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gnotes-by-appest/id569843819?mt=8
great app i use it on my s4 every day

Sad Professor

Glad it worked.

If you set up iCloud email in iCloud settings you should then be able to enable Notes syncing with iCloud. It works the same way as with Gmail except there’s a proper Notes web app on iCloud.com that the notes will be synced with. To simplify things and avoid confusion it would probably be best if you moved all his existing notes over to iCloud, then disable notes syncing with Gmail and set iCloud as the default notes account. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s any easy way to move notes over to another account on iOS without having to copy and paste each note over. And disabling notes in Gmail will delete them from the phone so you’d need to be sure first.

It might be easier to just use Evernote. Apple’s Notes app isn’t particuarlly reliable in my experience. I’m not sure I’d trust any cloud syncing notes app with important data, though at least Evernote keeps a history.

BenEadir

Thanks everyone, your input is much appreciated.

Cheers,

Ben