How to recover deleted Apple Notes after 30 days

By Caner Kaya, Kayabyte · Last updated 17 October 2026

When you delete a note in Apple Notes, it goes to the Recently Deleted folder and stays there for about 30 days. After that, Notes removes it for good, on every device that syncs with the same account. There is no hidden archive in iCloud you can ask Apple for.

That doesn’t always mean the note is lost. Any backup made while the note still existed has a copy of it. This guide lists every place worth checking, from quickest to most work.

First: make sure it really is past 30 days

Check Recently Deleted in all the places it can be. Each Notes account has its own Recently Deleted folder.

1. On iPhone or iPad: open Notes, tap the back arrow until you see the Folders list, and scroll down. Look for Recently Deleted under iCloud and under On My iPhone (or On My iPad).
2. On a Mac: open Notes, show the sidebar (View, Show Folders) and look for Recently Deleted under each account.
3. On the web: sign in at icloud.com/notes and open Recently Deleted there.

To recover a note from Recently Deleted, open the folder, tap Edit (or Control-click the note on a Mac) and move it to another folder.

If the note was in a Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo or other mail account, it was never in Notes’ own Recently Deleted. Look in that account’s Trash or Deleted Items folder in the mail app or on the web. More on this in Why is Recently Deleted empty in Apple Notes?

Before you look in backups: protect them

The backups that hold your note can be overwritten. Before anything else:

• Don’t back up your iPhone to your Mac yet. Finder keeps one backup per device and replaces it every time.
• Don’t erase or reformat your Time Machine disk, and don’t start a new one.
• Don’t restore your iPhone or Mac from a backup yet. A full restore replaces what’s on the device now.

Where a deleted note can still be

1. A Time Machine backup of your Mac

If you use Notes on a Mac and back it up with Time Machine, each backup holds a full copy of your Notes database, including iCloud notes the Mac had downloaded. Time Machine keeps daily backups for a month and weekly backups after that, for as long as the disk has room. A note deleted three months ago can still be in a backup from four months ago.

The catch: Time Machine can’t restore a single note. You have to restore the whole Notes folder, and doing that carelessly replaces your current notes. Our step-by-step guide shows how to do it safely: How to restore a note from Time Machine.

2. An iPhone or iPad backup on your Mac

If you back up your iPhone to a Mac with Finder (or iTunes on older macOS), that backup includes the notes that were on the phone when it was made, also iCloud notes the phone had downloaded. If the last backup was made before you deleted the note, the note is in it. See How to get notes back from an iPhone backup on a Mac.

An iCloud Backup of your iPhone doesn’t help here: when Notes syncs with iCloud, the notes are left out of the iCloud Backup, because they’re already stored in iCloud. Restoring an iCloud Backup doesn’t bring back notes deleted from iCloud.

3. A device that has been switched off

An old iPhone, iPad or Mac that hasn’t been online since before you deleted the note may still have it. Turn off its Wi-Fi before you open Notes, or put it in Airplane Mode, so it can’t sync the deletion. Then open Notes, find the note and copy it out: share it by AirDrop, print it to PDF, or copy the text into another app. Only reconnect when you’ve saved what you need.

4. A copy you forgot about

Search your email for the note’s text, in case you once sent it to yourself or someone else. Check exports, PDFs or screenshots in Files, Photos or iCloud Drive. If the note was shared with someone, they may still have it.

What doesn’t work

• Apple Support can’t restore deleted notes. iCloud.com’s Data Recovery restores files, contacts, calendars and bookmarks, not notes.
• Undelete apps for disks. Data recovery suites look for deleted files on a disk. A note isn’t a separate file but a record inside the Notes database, and modern Macs with SSDs clear deleted space quickly. They rarely help with notes.

The faster way, if you have a backup

Reading a Time Machine or iPhone backup by hand works, but it’s slow and easy to get wrong. NoteRescue, the Mac app we make, scans your Time Machine backups and iPhone backups (encrypted too, with your password), compares every note it finds with your notes today, and lists the ones that are missing. You can export them or restore them into Notes in a new folder, without touching your backups or your current notes. The scan is free, so you’ll know whether your note is there before you pay.

If you don’t have any backup from before the note was deleted, no app can bring it back. Turning on Time Machine now makes sure the next lost note can be recovered.