Does anyone know if it’s possible to have both local and cloud notes when using Notes.app in Mountain Lion? I’ve been using Notes.app on my work Mac, and I have some notes in iCloud that I’d like to have access to when I’m at work, but I don’t want my local notes to get merged into iCloud. I’ve tried a few different configurations, and I don’t seem to be able to keep both.
Has anyone else found a solution to this? Other than “don’t use iCloud” or “don’t use Notes.app”, that is.
Interesting question. It is certainly possible to have the Notes.app in Mountain Lion store notes locally “On My Mac” IF you do not have any accounts enabled to sync notes in the System Preferences Accounts pane.
You can then enable an Exchange account to sync notes and it will preserve the local On My Mac notes.
If you then enable iCloud, it will “merge” your local notes into iCloud and disable the On My Mac ‘account.’
So the short answer is No, you cannot have both local and iCloud notes in Notes.app. You can, however, have local & Exchange notes, or iCloud & Exchange notes. I use TextEdit to keep local “On My Mac” notes, as the the new ‘restore windows when reopening an application’ functionality makes it more like Stickies.
GRRRRRR.
Thanks for the confirmation, even if I don’t like the answer. I wonder what led Apple to make such different design decisions for Exchange and iCloud.
I’ve always assumed the reason for this is that Apple wants iCloud to very simply synchronise your data between all of your Apple devices. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can sometimes create a situation where you have an unwanted “On My Mac” account and this could confuse some users who then found some of their data missing on other devices.
On the contrary, with Exchange and other accounts, the idea seems to be precisely that you may want to keep certain data separate.
That’s rather stretching it for a distinction in use cases, especially given that MobileMe was marketed as “Exchange for the rest of us”. Not to mention the fact that notes are just mail messages stored in a special mailbox (where “special” means “the mailbox we’ve defined and don’t expose in the Mail UI”). There’s plenty of reasons why, say, a small business owner would want to have cloud and not-cloud documents. Mail’s got local folders even if I’ve got IMAP accounts, so I don’t see why Apple would say that its users aren’t smart enough to figure out local content in Mail but not in Notes.