How can I save iOS Notes on Windows that remain formatted?

Question

I have an iPhone 5 running iOS 8.4.1. I have many Notes that are formatted using bold, italics, carriage returns, etc.

How can I save these Notes off to my Windows laptop via iTunes or some third-party software, while preserving the formatting of my Notes? Such software would need to be able to sync those Notes back to my iPhone, while still preserving all the rich text.

Since I put sensitive information in my notes, I want everything to remain local to my devices, so I don’t want to use iCloud.

Answer 1

TLDR:

In Notes on your iOS device: Export (Share) the note via email to yourself. Then you can copy-paste it nicely from the email.

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I just figured out how to keep iOS note formatting in ipad Microsoft Word. you can open your iOS note and send it to an email. Once it opens the email, select all and copy to clipboard. For some reason it keeps the formatting this way even though it won't if you had copied directly from notes. I then pasted it into a Microsoft word document, and it kept all the formatting. So far this was the only way I could get it to keep the formatting outside of notes.

Answer 2

• The new version of iCloud Notes, available at https://www.icloud.com/#notes2, supports viewing rich text notes with formatting.
• Notes in OS X, besides viewing and editing rich text notes, supports exporting notes as PDF. Select the note you wish to export and choose File → Export as PDF….

Answer 3

Copy and paste them into TextEdit and save in RTF. This requires synchronising notes with iCloud or IMAP.

Answer 4

Newer versions of iOS don't even support syncing notes to Outlook as plain text anymore. iOS notes only sync to iCloud now, and we Windows folks who like accessing our data directly via files are left to fend for ourselves.

I would look at CopyTrans Contacts which has nascent iCloud notes support. I was able to use it to retrieve my notes from iCloud with SOME rich text formatting, albeit slightly mangled in places, and missing attached images, as HTML files on my PC.

Also, it loses the creation and last edited date for the notes (syncing to Outlook Notes preserved the date). If the CopyTrans folks can figure out how to preserve the date, pull down any images and fix the formatting problems, we'll have a decent solution.

For now, it's better than nothing, and your only other option is to e-mail all your notes to yourself (it's okay if you have 100 or less notes and an evening to do it, but for those of us with a few thousand accumulated over the years, not so doable).

Also, if you can program, you might try googling Apple iCloud API, and see if they have an interface where you can pull your notes down from code (who knows)...