Import or convert Stickies database or txt file into Sonoma

How to recover files backed up with Time Machine under macOS Catalina?

This is the way:

Restore items backed up with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support

The formatting for a TM Backup under macOS 10.15 Catalina would have Normally have been HFS Journaled / GUID Partition Mapping

macOS 14 can read and write to HFS Journaled / GUID Partition Mapped Drives

Nothing has changed in that regard

Now, if the TM Backup under macOS 10.15 is using some other Non Native macOS drive formatting

All bets are off

If your new Mac inherits your backup history

Transfer your information to Mac from another computer or device

If you had the old digest format StickiesDatabase in your ~/Library folder and ran the Stickies application once on Catalina, it would have extracted individual digests and wrote them as UUID named Rich Text Directories (RTFD) containing that digest content in a .rtf file. The original (and unused) StickiesDatabase remains in its original location, and the extracted digests are now here:

/Users/username/Library/Containers/Stickies/Data/Library/Stickies/



You could also run Stickies on Sonoma and it would either do the same treatment of your legacy StickiesDatabase digest or detect that the migration had already occurred by checking its .plist and do nothing.

defaults read com.apple.Stickies LegacyStickiesMigrated
1

@ VikingOSX, and all Victims

This happened to me too and VikingOSX hints are very helpful. But only close...

I got a new Macbook, Sonora, out of the box and tried to migrate by Time Machine Backup from a Mojave Macbook.

Beside other issues the copied StickiesDatabase in the ~/Library folder was present but will never be migrated. Any attempts fail. I guess Apple can not imagine somebody will do an upgrade (by 5 Versions) from 10.14 to 14.

In addition ~/Library/Containers/Stickies is hidden, like a lot other things (~/Library/Containers/StickiesMigration is not, but useless)

Next: under ~/Library/Containers/Stickies/Data is a .plist file that cannot be deleted or renamed.

So - a lot of obstacles!

~/Library/Containers/Stickies/Data/Library/Stickies can be deleted, so the initial stickies can be cleared off.

Luckily a got another macbook present with Ventura. Here the process worked:

1. Close Stickies app at The Ventura Macbook
2. Rename the StickiesDatabase in the ~/Library folder and the ~/Library/Containers/Stickies/Data/Library/Stickies folder at the Ventura Macbook
3. Copy the StickiesDatabase from Mojave to Ventura in the ~/Library folder
4. Command: 'defaults write com.apple.Stickies LegacyStickiesMigrated 0' at the Ventura Macbook
5. Open Stickies App at Ventura - The old Stickies will be migrated (!)
6. Replace the content of ~/Library/Containers/Stickies/Data/Library/Stickies on the new Sonora with the migrated Content of Ventura - Goal!
7. Revert Step 2. at the Ventura Macbook.

"I guess Apple can not imagine somebody will do an upgrade (by 5 Versions) from 10.14 to 14" - I am just trying the exact same thing on my M3-MBA. And Stickies is so far the last one to resist cooperation... >:|

All one should need to do is run the Stickies application once on Catalina (or later) to convert the old StickiesDatabase digest into the RTFD content I mentioned above. The old StickiesDatabase file remains in the local Library but thereafter is unused.

Any restore from Time Machine from a backup that had already included this conversion data would simply not attempt to convert the StickiesDatabase again because the conversion is remembered in the Stickies preference file. You can confirm that the conversion has taken place in the Terminal:

defaults read com.apple.Stickies | awk '/DashboardStickiesImported/ {printf "%d\n", $3}'

If it returns a value of 1, then it has already occurred.