Notes gone after an app update, reinstall or restore
Your notes vanished after updating, reinstalling or signing in again. What to do first, what not to do, and how to get them back without losing anything you've written since.
It's an unpleasant moment: JW Library opens, and the notes aren't there. Before anything else, one piece of advice — don't rush. Most of what makes this situation unrecoverable is done in the first ten minutes, by overwriting the very backup that still contains the missing notes.
Work through the steps below in order. The goal is to end up with one file containing both the old notes and anything you've written since.
Step by step
Don't overwrite your backups yet
Resist creating a fresh backup on top of an old one, and don't restore anything blindly. An older backup file is the most likely place your notes still exist.
Hunt for the newest backup you have
Check email attachments, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, your computer's downloads folder and any other device you have restored to. Backups are small, so people often have more copies than they remember.
Look inside the file before restoring it
Load the candidate at jwsync.org and see what's actually in it — how many notes, from which publications, up to what date. That tells you whether it's the right file to use, before you commit to a restore.
Back up the current device too
Even if it looks empty, back it up. If you've written anything since the notes disappeared, this file is the only copy of it.
Merge the two, then restore
Merge the old backup with the current one at jwsync.org. The result contains the recovered notes and everything written since, with duplicates kept once. Restore that merged file — never the old backup on its own.
Why restoring the old backup on its own is the wrong move
A restore replaces the device's library outright. If you restore an old backup directly, you get the missing notes back and lose everything written after that backup was made. Merging first is what makes the recovery lossless.
If the backup itself won't restore
A file that errors out during restore isn't necessarily lost. Run the health check on it — damage from interrupted downloads, cloud sync or a renamed extension is often repairable, and a cleaned copy will restore normally.
Frequently asked questions
- Are the notes still on the device somewhere?
- Not in a form you can get at from outside the app. Recovery realistically means an earlier backup file — which is why keeping old ones matters so much.
- Does signing in again bring notes back?
- No. Personal study data isn't held in an account; it lives on the device and travels only through backup files.
- What if the only backup I have is months old?
- Merge it with a backup of the device as it is now. You'll recover everything the old file has, and keep everything the device still has, without choosing between them.