Secret Garden

I have been having an extremely annoying problem with my iPhone 4's Notes app lately. I use it a lot to write notes to self and more importantly, use it as the text editor to compose comments to post on LJ. But since my last iOS4 update, the Notes app started to randomly truncate what I wrote. Kid you not! Those thoughts I jotted down in the past 5 minutes? Could arbitrarily disappear in a blink of an eye! *argh*

I finally googled online to see if my problem is unique. Lo and behold, I'm not the only one having the exact same problem! Surprised? Not. Turns out Apple recently made a change to Notes so that it will silently sync whatever notes being edited with the user's online email! True enough, unbeknownst to me, there is a "Notes" folder created for each of the email accounts (I had two) I set up on my iPhone.

That sure explained why something is seemingly overwriting my texts. Depending on the time the sync occurs and the speed of the data transfer, if I happen to be editing during the syncing, the service replaces the version I'm modifying with an earlier cached version!

Good news is there's an easy way to stop this from happening again. To turn off sync for Notes, on the phone, go to Settings > Mail, Contact, Calendars > Mail Account and make sure the Notes is on Off position. Also in iTunes, click the info pane and deselect the option to Sync Notes. Phew!

( One last thing... )