How to transfer “On my iPhone” notes to iCloud?

After enabling iCloud Notes sync on your iPhone, the original iPhone notes still remain on the device and are not pushed to the iCloud account. This is an Apple limitation which can be circumvented by following the steps below. This article will help you transfer the “On My iPhone” notes to iCloud. The method works for iPad and as well as with iPod Touch.

iPhone notes not syncing to iCloud

If you want to transfer your old iPhone notes to iCloud, enabling iCloud notes sync will unfortunately only push newly-created iPhone notes to the iCloud account. The iPhone notes you already had prior to enabling iCloud sync, remain locally on the iPhone under an account called “On My iPhone”. If you have an iPad, this newly-created notes account will be called “On My iPad”.

To access the “On My iPhone” notes account, simply open the Notes app and tap on “Notes” under “On My iPhone”.

How to transfer “On My iPhone” notes to iCloud?

Important information for iOS 11 users

Due to an iOS 11 limitation, moving notes to iCloud is no longer possible.

A quick solution to transfer “On My iPhone” notes to iCloud is to move or copy the notes to the iCloud account using CopyTrans Contacts. To do so:

Download CopyTrans Contacts from the following page:
Download CopyTrans Contacts
Install the program. If you need help installing CopyTrans Contacts, please refer to this article.
Run CopyTrans Contacts and connect the iPhone.
First, you need to connect your iCloud account with the program. To do so, from the main program window, navigate to “More > Cloud setup”:
Click “+ New connection” and then click “iCloud”:
Next, enter your iCloud account credentials, check the box next to Notes and click “Add account”:

Note: If you experience trouble connecting your iCloud account, please read this troubleshooting article.
Close the “Cloud setup” window and from the main program window click the Notes icon on the left. You will see both the local iPhone notes saved within the “On My iPhone” account and the notes from your iCloud account. The iCloud notes are marked by a small cloud icon:
Now select a local iPhone note, right-click and choose “Move to…” or “Copy to…”. Finally, choose your iCloud account. In my case, it appears simply as “iCloud account”.

You can transfer multiple notes from “On My iPhone” account to your iCloud account at the same time. To select multiple notes, simply check the box next to each respective note.

Note: The “Move to…” function transfers the local iPhone note to the iCloud account and deletes the original note. The “Copy to…” function copies the local iPhone note to the iCloud account and keeps the original note under “On My iPhone”.
The selected local iPhone notes are now transferred to iCloud. This is indicated by the small cloud icon which appears next to each of the respective notes:
You can verify that the local iPhone notes were moved to iCloud by logging in to iCloud and navigating to the Notes section:
The notes which previously appeared locally under “On My iPhone” are now saved to iCloud.