How do you backup Notes?

Sorry, but unless you have old itunes and old lion mac os x, these are just remnants of the past. they won't get re-synced or updated as you use notes. At this point there is unfortunately no way to backup your notes that are on icloud. No way.

It's time to write to Apple a feedback requesting this essential option.

... many of us have hundreds of notes not willing to be lost. We need offline backup/restore.

I found this today:

Notes for OS X Mountain Lion

• Open Notes.
• Select View > Show Folders.
• Create a new folder called Notes Backup in the On My Mac section of your folders list.
• Select one or more notes from your All iCloud folder. Holding the Option key down, drag the notes into the Notes Backup folder. A green plus icon should appear as you're dragging the Notes to the new folder. This creates a copy of your iCloud Notes on your computer.
• If you have an iCloud section in your folders list, but not an On My Mac section, you will need to create one.
  • Quit Notes.
  • In System Preferences, select iCloud. Deselect Notes.
  • Open Notes. Select File > New Folder. Name your folder Notes Backup. Create a new note in that folder as a placeholder. Quit Notes.
  • In System Preferences, select iCloud. Select Notes.
  • Open Notes. You should now see a section for iCloud and a section for On My Mac. Follow the instructions above for making a local backup of your iCloud Notes.

Source: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT4910

So there actually IS an Apple endorsed way to create an additional copy which resides who knows where on your Mac and may or may not be restorable if your whole Library folder is copied... Hope this helps someone.

I sync notes via IMAP G.Mail and there is a Notes mbox > Info plist in the user library which is backed up with TM.

From Notes Help:

Automate tasks for Notes

You can automate tasks for Notes using AppleScript or Automator.

• With AppleScript, you can use scripts to work with notes, folders, attachments, and accounts.Open the AppleScript dictionary for Notes
• With Automator, you can create automated tasks by dragging actions into a workflow. Automator records the sequence of actions, which you can later play back as an automated task.For example, you can create an automated task to move a set of notes from one folder to another.Open Automator

If you have more than one iOS device, the iCloud is a sound method to backup iPhone notes since it pushes and saves your notes to all your devices. Even if they iCloud fails for one reason or another, the notes would continue existing on all of your iOS devices.

You could also setup iTunes iOS backup or enable iCloud backup (both backup iPhone notes among other data on your device) so you could restore them later on if needed.

The previous Apple recommended method of backing up your Notes -

that is decribed in https://support.apple.com/kb/HT4910has been changed to:

Copying notes

Open the Notes app at iCloud.com. Copy the text of each note and paste it into a document on your computer, such as a Pages or TextEdit document. Save the document to your computer.

Thanks Apple.

Has there been any upgrade to the Notes mac App with Mavericks?

Is there a way to backup notes from iPad to a Window's comp? All this content is about backing up to Macs and since I don't own one it kind of does me little good.

Thanks

Found the Notes mbox under mail but it might be from Lion when all notes were sent to mail as I have one in both IMAP accouns. Not sure..

Don't get caught out with the hidden user library. 🙂 Finder > hold down option key > Go. > Library.> Mail > V2 > IMAP address > Notes. mbox

One: turning on iCloud backup sets off a warming on iOS saying that this action stops iTunes local backup.

Two: your notes as backed up to iCloud will only restore if your iPhone is stolen, dies, etc. But if your notes get deleted or get lost AND immediately this is propagated to the cloud, they're gone. Their deletion will propagate to your iMacs, MacBooks, iPads, etc... You may just see them disappearing and say Doh! The only way to call that backup would be KNOWING that your notes on one device are gone, then immediately cutting internet from all others and rewrite them one by one (good luck if you have hundreds), because even if offline you'd not be able to say store and restore....

Apple, we love you, but this is ridiculous. Even more so now that you're big and can afford solutions.

So it appears at this point in time the Notes app on OS X ML doesn;t get backed up in Time Machine, i.e like all other apps, you can't open the app, then 'go to Time Machine' and it brings up Notes history, it just seems to bring up Finder instead..

I hope Notes will be included and work just like other apps do when backed up via Time Machine.

Bubs_69 wrote:

So it appears at this point in time the Notes app on OS X ML doesn;t get backed up in Time Machine, i.e like all other apps, you can't open the app, then 'go to Time Machine' and it brings up Notes history, it just seems to bring up Finder instead..

I hope Notes will be included and work just like other apps do when backed up via Time Machine.

The "notes" are stored here:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.notes/Data/Library/CoreData/ExternalRecords/

Then it is burried in folders with unique ids.

You can dig into that folder to find them and use Time Machine to restore. They are saved with a name like p16.notesexternalrecord.

I haven't played with restoring them and seeing what happens when your recover in Time Machine then open Notes. I didn't have any that I deleted previously.

Potato, potahto.

The point is to back them up and recover individually. Seems to come as close as anything.

Are you sure those aren't the notes and the SQLite database is just the index?

I won't have the time to dig into it deeper, so I'll leave that up to those who need the feature.

Barney, are you saying that is how you get to the notes backup in Time Machine? I deleted some notes accidentally. I forgot that my old iPhone that I was giving to my son would sync with my new iPhone and iPad. I was deleting things off of what I was giving him so he would have the space. Then I realized it was telling my two devices to delete them. So I turned Time Machine off right away so it wouldn't get the message to delete those, in case it worked that way. So I have searched in Time Machine by the word Notes and by the name of the Individual missing notes, but that didn't get me anything. So when you say the noter are at "

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.notes/Data/Library/CoreData/ExternalRecords/

Then it is burried in folders with unique ids.", how do I get to that? Open the first and then the next ,etc.?

I need to turn my son's phone notes OFF so they won't sync with mine anymore or he will be deleting the rest of my notes.

Yes, dig into each folder. You'll find some notes in there. I use Quicklook (press space bar) to read them.

If, as someone mentioned, they are just images, you at least can recreate the text note from the picture.

I found mine inside the ImapNote/_records/0 folder inside the unique ID folder at the above path.