How do you backup Notes?

Yes I am sure. The SQLite database is the store of record.

That said, for anyting "on the network" (i.e in iCloud), backing up and restoring the database isn't that useful because iCloud is considered the "store of record" so if you delete stuff and it syncs to iCloud, then restoring the SQLite database won't do much good: The next time the machine goes online the iCloud version of things (i.e. deletes) will bowl over the local copies.

FYI if you want to see EVERYTHING in notes you could go to that directory and type "sqlite3 NotesV1.storedata .dump" and it will spew it all out as ASCII. Do a redirect (i.e. sqlite3 NotesV1.storedata .dump > notesbackup.txt" and you have a backup. You could then figure out the SQLite command to re-load that backup if you ever need it (this is left as an exercise for the reader ;-)

Right, that's what has happened to me twice now. Once the note seemed to just delete itself on one device and I rushed upstairs to get it off the other device and poof, right in front of my eyes, it was deleted via iCloud. This time, though, I did it because I forgot that my son's iPhone (my old one) was still synced with my new phone and iPad and I was deleting notes from his and it then deleted them off of mine before I realized that was happening.

I don't know SQL or ASCII. I am going to see if I can follow what you are saying in Time Machine.

Hey there for everyone. I had the same problem, I wanted to restore my notes from my Time Machine Backup.

So its quite easy. You just open:

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

and the same path but on your backup. Then you copy the Folder with the large number onto your hard disk.

And the last thing you have to do is to open:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.notes/Data/Library/Notes/

and replace the SQlite databases with the ones of your Timemachine Backup.

Im not using iCloud so I dont know if this will work out when you sycn the next time. For me its okay 🙂

This shell-command tells sqlite to write all your notes to a single text/html file:

echo 'SELECT * FROM ZNOTEBODY;' | sqlite3 ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes/NotesV1.storedata > ~/notes.html

As others pointed out, the notes reside in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes/ . If you want to restore your notes with Timemachine, you have to restore the whole directory, containing of NotesV1.storedata, NotesV1.storedata-shm and NotesV1.storedata-wal (these files seem to depend on each other). You can also copy this directory from Timemachine to anywhere on your filesystem and extract the notes with sqlite.

For example copy the directory to your desktop and run

echo 'SELECT * FROM ZNOTEBODY;' | sqlite3 ~/Desktop/Notes/NotesV1.storedata > ~/Desktop/notes.html

Works great for me!

Kjell,

I haven't tried your instructions, but in the name of the whole community and people who care and use notes for hundreds of their notes (as it should be as it's the only app that supports the built-in iphone/ipad spotlight function and Siri) I heartily thank you.

Thank you for sharing your hard earned knowledge. I'll try it and sleep better. 😉

Best,

Roman

Alright: couldn't resist and tried it.

Yes, my current iCloud stored notes were saved in a huge, badly readable and non formatted HTML file. At least the text would have been backed up in this case so the loss would be less dramatic. Still, no workable restore at this point.

****, APPLE, why don't you let us just drag and drop those notes to a folder, zip them up, and when needed drag them back to the notes.app?!

[sorry for the rant, i'm so %$#$%@]

Nice thought. Please try, before you post. Time machine, with the advent and intro of iCloud has lost a lot of functionality.

I'd be thankful if you tried a case and described how a previous state (say an hour before, last week, etc).

Thank you.

Notes are stored on your computer (just like contacts, calendars, mail etc) and are backed up by any local backup system, such as Time Machine.

Roman1 wrote:

Nice thought. Please try, before you post. Time machine, with the advent and intro of iCloud has lost a lot of functionality.

Attribution please.

Of course it would be easier to restore single notes if they were plain text files. But the format the notes are stored in is not as proprietary and obscure as I first thought. (Only the file-extension "storedata" is.) Actually it's just a sqlite-database that can be read and modified quite easily, as I found out now: There's a Firefox-extension called SQLite Manager that you can use to browse all of your notes - even ones that where previously deleted! Although I don't know for how long deleted notes are kept (and if all of them are kept), I can confirm that I saw one in there that I had deleted weeks ago.

I hope that helps!

I just found your post today...

There are a few things about this program I'd like changed, but it does "exactly" what I wanted done (a solid backup of the information on my IPHONE to my PC)

Of course you already knew this, but I wanted to thank you for the post. I'm really irritated with Apple for making this so difficult for me and irritating for so long. I bought the program and it allows "anything" to be saved locally. I haven't explored all the options, but I have the backup running now. I don't see a restore yet, but again, I do have the data.

Thanks !

This happened to me only today. Mild panic ensued. iMac, iPhone, iPad = wiped. Grabbed my laptop killed the wireless and cut and pasted into a document (and then subsequently pasted back). Close run thing. Worrying.

Notes needs a Trash folder or something.

Failing that a discrete backup / export option.

When I bought my iPhone 5 , the one thing I said was important to me ,having had the iPhone 4 was the ability to back up notes , everyone from 02 to the Apple store told me I could automatically back it all up through iTunes .

what a load of rubbish you can't .

Hopefully ill find myself a phone that does , when I do ill tell you all the one to get .

Or better still iPhone need to do something about this

You can use iPhone Backup Extractor to get to the notes in backup and then use SQLite Database Browser to view the text. See my post here:

http://goo.gl/JZvfR

If you need more info, I have other posts that explain the process.

As Kjell Peterson and others posted some time ago, it's possible to generate a html file of all the records.

Here are another command line that writes the complete notes, with titles, to a file "notes.html" in the home directory of the user.

sqlite3 ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes/NotesV1.storedata 'select znote.ztitle, znotebody.zhtmlstring from znote, znotebody where znotebody.znote=znote.z_pk' > ~/notes.html

And here another command that generate a complete backup of the sqlite db. In this command it's necessary to use the complete pathname of the file.

sqlite3 ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes/NotesV1.storedata '.backup /users/username/notesbackup2a.sqlite'

Both commands works for Mountain Lion.

If Apple changes the default location of Notes files...