Thursday, September 01, 2016

Lost notes recovered

Last week, on the first day I went to University #2 (where I now exclusively work, we'll keep University #1 for my husband's place of work, my former "adjuncting to no end" grounds) I finally deleted U#1's email account (ou outlook) from my phone so I could add U#2's email.

I felt triumphant, and symbolically, it was my last act, it was when I finally cut the cords with that institution.

Except that the next morning I discovered that the bulk of my iPhone Notes were GONE!! Hundreds of some really important notes: favorite recipes, stats from my sons' well-child visits from the past three years, passwords to my kids' iPads, notes from my ADHD therapy. It was all gone.

Well, not really! It was all stored in my outlook email account with U#1 and I found them all safe and sound a few days later. There was one problem: how to recover them? I knew that if I deleted the email account for U#2 and re-established U#1 I'd get them back, HOWEVER:

1) I don't need U#1's email anymore, I only need U#2's! (the iPhone doesn't allow two Outlook/Exchange accounts on the same phone).

2) How would I transfer the notes to another account, like "iCloud" once I got them back? I couldn't find an answer to that online.

So...

I spent a few hours COPYING each date and note by hand to several emails to myself on gmail and, this morning, for good measure, I also saved them by year (2014, 15, 16) into Word documents. I intend to copy and paste several of them back into Notes, since I need them, I just know that this will be time consuming.

I had lots of fun copying the VERY RANDOM notes I had and was even able to find a few songs I'd heard on NPR and frantically recorded the program and the time on my Notes (if it's on Morning Edition or All Things Considered it's VERY easy to find the songs they play a few seconds of).

Yeah, one of those things that only a completely OBSESSED person like me would do, no? Yeah, I'm crazy, I know. But I like myself this way. ;-P

P.S. hyperfocus helps A LOT with these random useless tasks!

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