IOS Share was not working, or syncing. Data recovery?

Issues
1

I have been using an iCloud-shared draft for adding notes on my iPhone - via the Share Sheet - for a few weeks. I have been using the “Add to End of” feature in the Drafts capture screen to append to this shared draft - mostly links I’ve found, with short notes about why they were interesting, intending to spend time at the end of the week to classify everything and add to my PKM.
I just hopped on my MacBook to start acting on these items, and found nothing had been added to the draft - its modified-date was several weeks old. I followed the sync troubleshooting steps, found that everything was configured correctly, and enabled sync logging on both devices. All of a sudden, everything is working, for things I am capturing while I test today. (“heisenbug”)
When I viewed the local IOS draft, it also had zero changes, as well as no timestamp update, despite using the “Add to End of” feature in the Drafts IOS capture probably 100 times over the last few weeks. And so I am unsure if the sync was not working, or overwriting my IOS changes with the unchanged version on the Mac, or if the Share Sheet capture was not working on IOS and just dumping everything to the bit bucket. Either way, I have lost the weeks of information that I thought I’d appended to the local IOS draft (and expecting that to sync to my MacBook).
And so my question is, is there some local iCloud Drive cache or something I could drill int to try and recover this data? Given sync logging was not enabled, I am guessing there’s no log to consult.

Thank you.

2

Check the versions of your draft and your Drafts backups if you think there has been any overwriting.

1 Like
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Sync only occurs in the app on iOS. If you capture using the share extension, it will not sync to the cloud until the app itself gets a chance to run.

This, of course, will happen if you launch Drafts. It will also happen in the background periodically through Background App Refresh – but this is a little unpredictable and subject to OS scheduling. It’s usually pretty reasonable in frequency when you are on WiFI, and well-charged, less so in other conditions.

Make sure you do have Background Refresh enabled and enabled for Drafts in iOS Settings, and make sure you don’t ever force quit Drafts (swipe up out of the app switcher), which can temporarily disable refresh for an app.

As @sylumer mentioned, also check your version history. I suspect you edited the draft on Mac before if got a chance to sync and created a conflicted version.