How can I recover notes missing from the Notes app?

I recently opened the Notes app and found that about a month's worth of notes are missing. There is a gap between August 5th and September 3rd.

(This time period includes a note I wrote while in an airport listing the names and desks of air staff I dealt with while trying to handle a canceled flight, and now I've failed a complaint with the airline and need those details. A few hundred euros of compensation might ride on having these details.)

I found one question about restoring deleted notes by using a program to read from the iTunes backup, but my iTunes only seems to keep one backup, the latest, and the notes are not present. I synced before noticing, and of course iOS syncs over wifi now so it may have synced before then anyway.

• iPhone 4 running the latest iOS 5 (and latest iTunes etc. I am still using Lion.)
• The phone is synced with iCloud, which is also synced with my MBP and iPad. I am signed into the same account on all of them.
• I do use GMail for email, but as far as I know not for notes. I could not find my missing notes in any account.
• When I wrote the note, I had no data connection (overseas) but did a couple of days before and after
• I do not know when the notes vanished, but only noticed the hole in the dates when I looked for this specific important note.

What do I do?

Solution 1:

This is a little like what happened to me, I posted a question here relating to notes that had gone missing too.

It seems that if you take a note while offline, when you sync with icloud it will sometimes without warning delete notes it does not know about :( Luckily in my case since I had made the note on my mac it created a recovery folder for me.

Perhaps your phone may have done a similar thing? If you open notes and hit the 'accounts' button at the top, is there a 'recovered items' folder?