Exporting All Your iPhone Notes at Once Is Kinda Complicated. Here’s How to Do It

I’ve jotted down nearly 2,000 notes in the decade that I’ve used iCloud on my various iPhones. I write down everything from recipes, bills and grocery lists to short stories, scripts and poetry. If I’m in a new country, I’ll use my notes to list all the places I want to visit. If someone recommends a good movie, I’ll make a note of it. If there’s a subject I suddenly want to research for hours on end — you guessed it — into a note it goes!

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All of these notes are important to me, and recently I thought about how I would feel if I somehow lost access to all of them. I’m not sure how that would happen: I’d have to lose my iPhone, and iCloud would have to suddenly disappear. Nonetheless, it pained my heart to think I could lose all those notes.

So I set out to export every single note I’ve written, and it turns it’s not easy to do.

Apple makes it so that you can only export a single note at a time from the Notes app, whether you’re using AirDrop, email or text message. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to export all of my thousands of notes within a manageable time frame. It would be far too tedious. There’s just no way.

Well it turns out that you can just ask Apple to export every single note in your iCloud. Here’s how. For more about iCloud, check out how you can decide if Apple’s new iCloud storage plans are worth it and how to easily delete duplicate photos from your iCloud.

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How to ask Apple to export all of your notes

On your iPhone, open Safari or whatever web browser you use and go to appleid.apple.com. Sign in to your iCloud account using Face ID, Touch ID or your credentials. Next, tap the arrow at the top of the page, to the left of the sign out button, and go into Privacy.

Scroll down and tap on Manage your data underneath “Your Data.” You may have to sign in to your Apple ID account again. Now tap Request a copy of your data under the “Get a copy of your data” section. 

Next, choose a maximum file size that you want to receive, in case you don’t want to download one very large file and prefer to download smaller files. You can choose from 1GB to 25GB. Finally, hit Complete request.

The ZIP folder will contain individual folders for every one of your notes, which will appear in text document format. The folder may contain other files if the note has attachments like photos, sketches or documents.