ICloud – Possible to access/restore past versions of Notes in iCloud

I ended up copying all of my documents (I didn't really have that many) out of iCloud to the local disk, and then deleting them from iCloud. The old versions were still showing up in Spotlight, so I added the entire drive to Spotlight's Privacy list to delete the index. Then I put the documents back into iCloud, removed the drive from the Privacy list, and let it sit for a few hours while it reindexed everything. After two days of usage everything seems to be working normally once again. Thanks to @bmike for the ideas.

If you are signed into iCloud on your iPad, generally changes you make to iCloud-synced items will sync to your other devices through iCloud.

Particularly for Notes, you can have device-specific notes by doing the following on your iPad:

Go to Settings > Notes and go to the bottom where you should see an "On My iPad" Account option. Toggle that on and you will then have a place in Notes to store notes that stay just on your iPad. This will appear in the list of folders under "ON MY IPAD" and you can create new folders under that section, just as you would for iCloud.

For Calendars, there is no way to maintain a local-only calendar and still sync another calendar to iCloud. (You can do this if you use something other than iCloud to sync your calendar, such as Gmail, but not with iCloud.)