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Comment by concinds | Hacker News Reader

If you did what I'm thinking of, you could have just turned sync back on and all the notes would have reappeared.

Yup. But the maddening part is that this is never made clear in any of the messaging.

You get a message like "all notes will be removed from this device", but without any kind of reassurance that "all 172 are still present in iCloud".

And if you're not an expert in this, it's a huge risk to take. When does deleting something synced locally leave it in the cloud, and when does deleting something synced locally also delete it from the cloud? This is one of the biggest and most dangerous UX confusions that exists right now, not specifially with Apple but all around.

iCloud Photos are even worse. A family member had some corruption or misclick (wasn't there) that made their organized photo albums disappear even though the photos were still present. Luckily they have backup software I set them up with backing up their entire library, so I walked them through restoring from the day before. We then watched as iCloud noticed it was an old copy of the library and helpfully re-deleted all their albums. We never managed to fix it. I hate computing and want off of this.

This. Turning sync off shouldn't delete notes from iCloud. It just doesn't sync the notes from iCloud to the specific device in question so they are not visible from that device. To confirm OP could have logged in icloud.com from browser and seen the notes there. Then you can decide on a per-device basis whether you want to sync notes and have them be visible on that specific device.

What if you wanted to really delete the notes from Apple's servers?

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