With **JOSM** you can easily download notes as you wish, even all closed notes, no matter how long ago they were closed.
To set JOSM to download notes according to your needs, you have to go to **preferences (F12)**, enable the **Expert Mode** if you haven't it enabled, click on the **Advanced Preferences** tab and seach for *notes*, as shown in this image:
![alt text][1]
There, you will have several notes settings. For what you are asking, the two keys you are interested in are **osm.notes.daysClosed** and **osm.notes.downloadLimit**.
**osm.notes.daysClosed**: This key lets you specify how many days closed notes should be downloaded. **Default is 7**, that means that JOSM would download all notes that were closed during the last 7 days. It will add, obviously, all open notes.
You can change that value to any other number. If you want **only open notes** to be downloaded, you will set it to **0**. And for what you are interested, if you want to **download all notes, open or closed**, whatever the time they were closed, you should set the value to **-1**.
**osm.notes.downloadLimit**: This key is important because, if you are going to download all open and closed notes for a certain area, their number could be big. This key lets you decide the maximum number of notes JOSM will download. **Default is 1000**, but you can change it to any number from **1** up to **10000**.
[1]: https://help.openstreetmap.org/upfiles/notesJOSMpreferencesChangeClosedNotesKeys2_cxU0YHj.png
