Need help with new iPhone and safely deleting data

Factual Questions
1

I purchased a new I phone. I will be returning my old one for credit. I’ve successfully transferred service and all of the data on my old phone to my new phone.

I need to delete the info/data on the old phone before turning it in.

The problem: I have a lot of important (and some personal) information in ‘Notes’. When I delete a note on my old phone it deletes it on my new phone. Apple info on the web says just restore it from “Recently deleted” folder on new phone. Except the restores it on my old phone as well.

This is driving me crazy. I’ve been at it for hours trying every solution I’ve googled to no avail.

And yes, I know it’s not smart keeping personal data on my phone but it’s security locked.

There has got to be a simple solution to this, right?

2

Did you try Settings, General, Transfer or Reset Phone?

3

Yeah, what Dewey_Finn said. Wipe the whole old phone instead of deleting content piecemeal: Erase iPhone - Apple Support

(Or longer but more thorough instructions on the whole trade-in prep process here: What to do before you sell, give away, or trade in your iPhone or iPad - Apple Support)

4

I guess I was afraid of losing in recoverable data so I did the piecemeal as test. How can I be sure if I blank out the old phone I won’t lose notes?

5
  1. Place old iphone next to new iphone
  2. Turn on new phone (old phone already turned on). You’ll see on the new phone a choice to setup the phone using your old phone
  3. Enter unlock code on old phone
  4. Phones will purr happily at each other for a while
  5. New phone now contains old phone contents
  6. Erase old phone
6
  1. Because this is the procedure everyone is supposed to do before trading in a phone (see the second link, “What to do before you sell, give away, or trade in your iPhone or iPad”). If it erased your synced cloud data, Apple would get millions of complaints every time a new iPhone came out. Many tears would be shed and the global GDP loss would be unfathomable.
  2. You can turn on Airplane Mode before wiping if you want.
  3. If you’re really paranoid, put it inside a faraday cage and then hike to a forest with no reception before you wipe, so it can’t make any network connections even if it wanted to.
7

Simply follow the directions posted in the previous reply by @Reply. This is the correct way to do it. I’ve done this many, many times. You will not lose your data on your new phone if you do it this way.

On the other hand, if you try to delete things piecemeal while still signed into iCloud like you tried to do, then it thinks you want to delete them everywhere. Don’t do this.

8

If you are turning it your old phone or giving it away, why wuold you not simply do the reset to factory default (once you’ve transfered the phone’s complete setup and data to the new phone)

I f you are truly worried, disconnect it from WiFI (and presumably, it no longer works as a celluar data or voice phone since that has been set up in the new phone) and then do the reset. This is unnecessary but it is peace of mind to assure you the rest of the iPhone universe will have no idea the phone has been reset, won;t try to delete anything in parallel.

My annoyance was that when I went to delete stuff from the cloud one day - it doesn’t need a copy of what’s on my phone - it deleted also from my phone.

9

Ok, old phone wiped. Thank you to you all for your help.