Deleted iPhone Notes Remain Stored In iCloud Even After 30 Days

Elcomsoft, a software company based in Russia, has found that iPhone notes written and stored in the handset’s Notes app and synced to iCloud remain stored even when they’ve been deleted by the user. The company says that the notes remain in storage also after the 30-day expiration period of the “Recently Deleted” category ends.

If this is true, it obviously contradicts Apple’s claim that notes stored in the app and synced with iCloud are completely erased from servers after the 30 day expiration period is over. Elcomsoft’s claim means that while the notes are completely deleted from your device, they do remain in the cloud in one way or the other.

The way Elcomsoft describes it, basically, the server stores a show of the notes after they’ve been deleted from the device and the 30 day period is up. So accessing them is only possible through the company’s proprietary Phone Breaker tool. The tool is capable of downloading and extracting all of those shadow notes from iCloud.

It performed a demonstration on an iPhone 7 with 288 notes in it. When the tool is used, it extracts 334 notes from the iCloud account which include 46 additional notes that were long deleted but were somehow available on the server.

Apple has been made aware of this and while people expect that it would fix the matter, it has not yet issued a comment concerning this claim from Elcomsoft.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: Apps, iOS, iPhone