Thursday, July 09, 2026

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.

- fn -

[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.

No comments: