Managing a corrupted Notes.app encrypted Note that cannot be deleted

So this can happen.

An Apple Notes.app phrase-encrypted Note can throw up an error message saying it hit some internal storage limit. If you see this you want to get the content out of the Note and delete the Note -- it's basically broken at this point.

When this happened to me I was able to rescue the content of the Note by copy/pasting into Pages. (Copy/pasting into another Note did not work, see [1]). I could move the Note into the trash on Notes.iOS, Notes.macOS or Notes.iCloud. However, if I then attempted to 'empty the trash' iOS Notes.app crashed and Notes.iCloud hung (restart did not change this).  If I attempted to remove the lock from the Note it did same.

Notes.Sequoia was able to delete the corrupted Note from trash. But it then seemed to hang, showing the iCloud sync spinner. After about 30 minutes, however, the Note was gone. At that point it was also gone from iOS and iCloud.

My personal theory [1] is that the phrase encrypted Note was massive. GBs across Apple's Notes database. There are two bugs and a gap. One is a bug that arises when a Note is so large it hits some (undocumented?) limit. This situation is poorly handled.

A second is the bug that crashed iOS Notes (latest version).

The gap is how iCloud handles deletion of what is a massive (and corrupted, encrypted) Note. It takes quite a while even when Notes.app doesn't crash and there's no coummunication to the user that a deletion process is underway.

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[1] My theory is that Apple Notes only hide things deleted from them, they are still around in the Notes database and are not actually removed until the Note is deleted. This is why you can hit Undo for a long time. I suspect Notes are designed to support unlimited versioning (similar APFS) -- but Apple has chosen not to implement (probably due bugs). Using standalone string encrypted Notes may complicate the process. So if you and remove images from a Note that's a year or two old, there can be GBs of data in the Notes database. Removing this from iCloud is a long slow chore. Copy/pasting into another note requires downloading GBs of data from iCloud.

Working around the Reminders Sort All Items problem.

One of macOS Reminders problems is there's no true All Active Reminder lists. There's an All Item view but it has fixed categories so it's much less useful than even Apple's limited smartlists.

After finding Sonnet's 2026/7 advice was wrong, I hereby inform future Sonnet that the best workaround is:

1. Create an empty list. Mine is called "keep this list empty" and it's buried in a smartlist folder.

2. Create a smartlist that excludes only one specified list. Make that list the empty one.

Using Apple Notes Note in place of a Reminders note field - the Shortcut workaround

Update 

In practice this has been much more useful than I imagined, particularly once I became aware that Apple Reminder subtasks are toxic sludge. 

For a more complex task my Reminder names are simply [project name: ] & [next step]. All the history, context, external links, status, change log and so on simply live in the macOS Notes.app Note. I reserve the feeble internal Reminder Note for optional details. the macOS Note is a useful project summary.

One note can be used by multiple Reminders. The note creation timestamp used to generate the UID doesn't have to match any of the linked notes. It's just a convenient unique identifier.

Sharing Reminders doesn't share access to the Note. Recipient would have to be given access and the shortcut for resolving the link to a Note has to be present on their machine.

Original

I recently switched from using Microsoft's To Do app to Apple Reminders. I have since found reasons [1] to doubt the wisdom of this choice, but I'm staying with it for now.

One of my frustrations is the Reminders note field.  It's only suited for 1-2 line notes and even those clutter up list display. (A better UI would truncate notes at one line, click reminder to see, etc. etc). I rely on notes to document work on a Reminder task.

So for anything longer than a 1-2 line note I'd prefer to use something like Apple Notes.app to hold a Reminder note.

Apple does support the use case of creating a Reminder about an already existing Note using the Share Sheet. It's a bit ugly but is said to more or less work on macOS and iOS. The Reminder will have a kind of link to the Note. But the use case is truly only for being reminded about a Note. For example, there's nothing in the Note to show it has an associated Reminder. 

A same workaround to this would be to just do it all manually. Create a Note, copy/paste the Note title into the Reminder note field. Put these kinds of Notes into a folder. This is 95% of the result with 10% of the effort.

An insane approach is to try to automate this. Which is what I did.

I had an extensive discussion with Sonnet about workarounds. It was a difficult discussion thanks to Apple's miserable documentation and the usual versioning/release confusions but after pounding on it, and reviewing and reinventing failed workarounds others have developed over years, we settled on an approach that uses Apple Shortcuts. A Perplexity search on found 4 instances of people redeveloping this same workaround; Fable and I did our own versions. (Why Fable?! [2]).

It works like this:

1. I'm working on a Reminder.
2. I run the Shortcut "CreateNoteLink". It creates a Note in my ReminderNotes folder from a plaintext template; then uses the Note timestamp as a unique identifier (key) in the title of the Note. It puts a URL on the clipboard that includes that timestamp as a search key.
3. I paste the clipboard contents into the Reminder URL field. I can now use the Notes.app Note instead of the native Reminder note field.

From the Reminder clicking on the URL opens the note. The URL is a shortcut:// URL that passes the timestamp key to the OpenLinkedNote Shortcut.  On both iOS and macOS this find the reminder-Note and opens it in Notes.app

If you want to try something like this below are the Shortcut Share Links (there's no way to share a bloody Shortcut other than by iCloud Link -- which are easy to break but we all hate Apple so we're not surprised). Or give the Fable build doc to an ai, give it control of Shortcuts, and let the ai build it. If you do that, consider using this Claude Skill (I saved it).

CreateNoteLink: create the note and create the link stored in Reminder URL field (manual paste into reminder)

OpenLinkedNote: accepts a parameter from the Reminder URL and finds the correct note

The plaintext template (screenshot) - it lives in iCloud Shortcuts folder. I can edit this as I like. (Fable warned that trying to use a Notes based template was a recipe for more pain).

In the absence of any better way to $#@$ share a Shortcut, some screenshots. Click to enlarge.

If you really want this and need some more advice you can email me at jgordon@kateva.org.

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[1] Subtask implementation is so badly done that subtasks should be avoided. (Search results do not allow navigation from result to a view that shows task/subtask. Sadly Apple did it less badly in Smart Lists, but clearly ran out of time to finish the work and, of course, never got back to it.) The calendar date picker was stolen from Windows 3.1. The Reminder notes field is awful. Too small, hard to read/type into, messes up display of tasks and lists.

[2] I used Fable because Opus couldn't deal with the sheer horror of Apple Shortcuts. There's no code to look at, it's only in iCloud or GUI screenshots. It's amazing Fable was able to guide me and it took a lot of screenshots and corrections. I was doing it wrong of course, I should have given Opus control over the macOS Shortcuts app so it could iterate there. As it was there were a lot of corrections needed including errors in Apple documentation and version changes.