How do you backup Notes?

I'm with Dancetoday,

Notes is obviously not ready to be used by the average mac user if it cannot be backed up and simply retrieved by Time Machine. It is unacceptable to have to go through the contortions suggested in this thread to retrieve a simple text note blasted out of existence by the insane execution of "cloud" technology that wipes everything in seconds off multiple devices. Given the nature of the cloud execution, having an easily retrievable backup in TM is ABSOLUTELY required.

I'm off Notes after trying to use it for the last two months. I liked the front end, but the execution is puerile.

PS: when I tried to reveal hidden files in TM, they were all grayed out and inaccessable. I have lost important information with a keystroke that should be recoverable. I expect more from Apple in useful applications. That is their stock in trade. At least, it was.

Jay Gamel

At the end of the day, you can make a new text document (TexEdit is great) or word processor doc for every "note" and file it in a folder: view by date created. use spotlight to search the folder. voila! a set of notes instantly searchable arranged by date, name or what you want, and they are ALWAYS backed up by time machine and easily retrievable. You can even see content instantly with the finder viewer. Using a sophisticated text editor like bbedit, texedit, etc. you can even place pictures, screen shots, urls, etc. in the 'note'.

You can tag for a "smart" folder.

You can even color up the folder background if you want to pretend it's an app.

First thing I did after installing Mavericks the day it came out was head to Notes and try something very, very Mac-like. Something that as far as I know Apple came up with decades ago and something that just plain makes sense in terms of usability. It even works across many Windows programs and most Office applications. Even Outlook will let you do it:

Drag and drop several marked notes on to desktop.

then

Drag and drop a single note on to the desktop.

Not possible. Wow. Wouldn't that be a nice way to "export" your notes for backup purposes? 😟

This is kind of sad, I use Note to store everything, precise information, urls, everythings — I dont want nothing that synchronize mistake, I want to simply do a physical backup in a point of time.

When you work in Note it is really easy to, without knowing, cut or replace information that become lost and be transfered as is to TM or whatever other backup system.

You endup with lost information.

Mac is loosing is way, this is a no brainer, any debutant in interface design and User experience will find that Note NEED to be able to import export it’s content. This is what Note is, a tool to manage a lot of information.

If you loose that information by a simple mistake with the keyboard or else without being able to reimport a trusted copy. The tools become useless.

Please Mac, wake-up ! 😕

Same type of crap with the lost custom Icons in the Finder Windows. Mac is the inventor of the icons !.

Now, because a genious designer decide that all gray is good, each single time I go to the Finder window, I have to overlook that I’m at the right place.

Hey Apple designer, think at what a custom icon is good for???????

By the way, if you want to hire me to help, go ahead... 25 years exp in Design. 😎

Finally!!!!

Here is the location for 10.6 (snow leopard) and maybe below (10.5 10.4 etc)

Kind: Mail Mailbox

Size: 2.8 MB on disk (2,079,374 bytes) for 286 items

Where: /Users/(*user name)/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Notes.mbox

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For those with 10.6 or similar older OS's, my question has always been, where did notes (which is inside apple mail on the computer) save it's data on your hard drive?

Ok.. for a long time I tried the new way to find the answer: looking on the web... finally, I did it the old fashoned way before the internet... I made a new test note and then started looking at the finder for what was most recent..

And finally... here is where it's stored:

I can't tell you how much of my writing I may have lost. The notes just tend to disappear... maybe since icloud debaucle which i no longer use... but still happens. and I'm almost certain it's not the boy erasing them anymore.

I made a backup folder on my hard drive, and put an alias of this folder to find it easier next time. But even that could go down so I'm thinking if it's crucial... to email the entire folder by compressing it first.

Thanks for nothing internet.. LOL. Want a solution? make it yourself.

Saddly, didn’t seem to be the same for Mountain Lion... Crap.

Apple proved again that they really take the time before imposing stupid interface (like the grayish finder window) and half bake programs.

I wonder if somebody at Apple even ask himself for what purpose people using Notes before putting it together ????

Did You?

Notes is uses to take Notes, YESSSSS!

Important notes that we want to store and consult easily. Notes is working, but if you cannot make a decent backup of those precious notes, as is, in a point of time, this become useless. You need to be able to export and import the totality or part of your notes at any time.

It is really easy to overwrite a note and loose that particular peice of precious information. Reverting it with TM will also kill many of your newer notes — Don’t even know if TM work with Notes?

2 posts by William LLoyd on january, 20 , 1 post by Jaswas on march 03 , and 1 post of Stephen Sparks on march 21 solve everything :

they indicate where are the files and how to reach them.

I just copy these files to save them. I also have timemachine backup and can get back the files through it.

What else ?

I am finally able to sync my old notes which were "on the phone" to the gmail account. It had been a complete waste of time to move them to icould or gmail account. Here are the steps:

0. Before you start, go to your gmail account and create a new label "iPhone Notes", which we will use to temporarily move all the notes to.

1. Go to you $HOME/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes/Notes.mbox on your Mac

2. This is the place where all the notes are synched which were "On the iPhone"

3. Search for all the .emlx files under this folder. Each file represents a note you created "on the phone".

4. Open all of them by hitting command+down arrow, they will all open in Mail

5. Now you should be able to see your Iphone Notes folder under gmail account if that is setup on your Mail client on Mac

6. Go to Message -> Move To -> IPhone Notes folder which you created on gmail and move the message to gmail

7. For all the messages just press option+command+T, which will keep repeating the same move to for all the messages

8. Now you have all the locally stored notes to Gmail

9. Now open gmail account and click on iPhone Notes folder or label

10. Now move all the messages to notes folder or label within gmail

11. You are done, this is the folder which stores all the notes in gmail.

Now you should be able to access it from anywhere.

Hope this saves your time.

Since this thread is in the Mac OS X Mountain Lion forum it will only pertain to a Mac operating system. The thread was discussing Mac OS X's Notes application which synced with Notes on iOS. Once the notes were synced to OS X on the computer we were able to back up that copy. Most in this section probably do not know much about Windows. It would be my guess you would want to get iOS Notes syncing with Google Mail or through Outlook on your PC where you could back them up.

There is always the iOS backup but I am not comfortable calling this a true backup.

Thank you so much for your feedback!! I just demoed the TouchCopy 12 product and liked it enough to purchase it! So far so good!! Weight lifted/ burden removed all because of this conversation and your feedback!! God Bless all of you! Thanks again!!😎

Since macosx el capitan, upgraded notes keeps its databases in Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes. Previous folder Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes is used for previous format of notes, so - it contains your old formatted notes before converting it to next version of Notes.

so Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes and Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes should be copied for backing up, new one and old.

Thanks so much for the new file locations. And have setup a secondary backup.

In the past, I was able to use an sqlite3 command to convert my Notes into HTML.

But the command I used:

sqlite3 'SELECT * FROM ZNOTEBODY;'

no longer works.

Anybody figure out how to dump the contents of the new SQL?

That didn't convert anything. It just displayed each of the fields in the znotebody table.

As far as I can determine, the table schema now doesn't have a textual representation of the Notes as they aren't necessarily text anymore. The content is stored as streams of data (BLOB).

For each note, you'd have to know the type of data that is stored and pass that to a program that can read them.

Hmmm... not having a way to backup / export the Notes is a big problem for me.

I'm able to manually export them but that's not really a long-term solution for me.

I keep important billing information in there. Might have to switch over to using a text doc in Dropbox.

I need to BACKUP IPHONE NOTES: So how does a person who has no idea what you are talking about (how to do all the computer steps) on how to backup and find the notes backup?

Is there an EASY way to backup and find them? HOW??

Is anyone at Apple working on this. I keep VERY IMPORTANT INFO on my notes.