Your library and sync

Your notes are kept on each of your devices and stay the same on all of them through your own iCloud.

Where your notes are

Your library is a folder of ordinary files that belong to you: each note, with its attachments, is a file of its own. There is nothing to set up and no folder to choose — the library lives inside NotaBene on each device and is mirrored to your private iCloud.

Every device holds the whole library, so everything works offline: you can read, write and search without a connection, and your changes go out when the connection is back.

Where a new note goes

A note you start while a notebook is open belongs to that notebook. A note made anywhere else — from a widget, Control Center, the Action button, Siri and Shortcuts, the Apple Watch, a flagged email, a calendar event, or a file dropped on the app's icon — goes into the notebook you choose in Settings ▸ Notes ▸ Default Notebook. The Share sheet starts on that notebook too, and lets you pick another.

Sync

Sync is automatic, over iCloud. A change made on one device arrives on the others by itself, and opening the app also asks for anything it missed. Each note syncs on its own, so two devices editing different notes never get in each other's way.

Settings ▸ Sync shows the sync status and when the last sync happened. Sync Now syncs at once.

A change from another device reaches a note you have open without taking you away from where you are writing. Whatever it is arrives: new text and a new title, an attachment that was moved, renamed or taken out, a picture that was resized, or an attachment switched between its preview and its name.

Note: If you have an attachment selected when a change to the note arrives, the selection is let go. Click or tap the attachment again to select it.

When two devices change the same thing

A note edited on two devices at once is not lost on either: one version stays the note, and the other is kept beside it as a conflicted copy.
Tasks, notebooks, tags, recordings and the marks on a picture are merged, so both changes are kept — a task ticked off on the Mac and another added on the iPhone while it was offline, a notebook made on one device and a tag on the other. Something deleted on one device and left alone on the other stays deleted. Something deleted on one device and changed on the other stays, because the change came later. When the same detail was changed on both, the later change wins.
A note deleted on one device while you were adding to it on another that had not synced yet stays, with your new text, and comes back on the other devices — out of the Trash. The text it had when it was deleted is kept in the note's history.

A note nobody was changing follows the deletion to every device, including what was typed in the last second before the deletion arrived. If the note is open on your screen when that happens, it says so: Note Moved to Trash, with Put Back, or Note Deleted.

Deleting many notes at once deletes all of them on every device, however many there are; they do not come back.

If one device loses its list of notebooks, it starts over with a single notebook but does not send that to your other devices, so it cannot take your notebooks and Shortcuts away from them. Anything you actually change still syncs at once.

A device you set up again — NotaBene deleted and installed anew, or signed in to another iCloud account — first downloads your library and only then sends anything of its own, so it takes your notebooks instead of replacing them. And if a list with a single notebook ever arrives from another device while your notes say otherwise, your devices keep their own list and send it back.

Start over

To remove every note from every device, open Settings ▸ Sync ▸ Start Over ▸ Delete All Notes…. It asks first, with Delete All Notes in red and Cancel. Your notebooks, tags and settings stay.