Locked notes and Touch ID
Any note can be locked so only you can open it, with Touch ID or your Mac’s password.
Locking a note
Choose Lock Note from the title bar’s right-click menu, or tap the lock in the note settings panel. The text and structure are sealed and the note shows a locked state until you authenticate. To unlock, click the note’s body (the title bar does nothing) and touch the sensor or type your password.
- Attachments are not encrypted. The lock seals the note’s text and structure; attached images, videos, and files are stored separately and stay readable on disk.
- An unlocked note relocks itself after about three minutes of sitting idle.
Locked notes also refuse to export as Shareable Notes until unlocked, and deleting one skips the plain-text archive.
The key lives in your Keychain
The unlock key is stored in your Mac’s Keychain, protected by user presence. That has one important consequence for multi-Mac setups:
To open a locked note on a second Mac, iCloud Keychain must be on (System Settings → your name → iCloud → Passwords & Keychain) on all your Macs. The note itself syncs through iCloud; its key travels separately through iCloud Keychain. Right after locking, give the key a few minutes to propagate.
“This locked note can’t be opened on this Mac yet”
That message means the note synced but the key has not (iCloud Keychain is off, or still propagating). Turn on iCloud Keychain everywhere, wait a few minutes, and try again.
Reset Lock is destructive
If a key is truly gone forever, Reset Lock lets you reclaim the note shell, but it permanently deletes the protected content. There is no way to recover the content afterwards. Only reset once you have accepted that.