How can I restore stickies which were not backed up on Time Machine?

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How can I restore stickies which were not backed up on Time Machine?

I accidently deleted some text on a stickie note. That note was not backed up in Time Machine. That text is also gone from the Stickies Database. Everything that I read online leads me to believe that I can find this deleted text in this file... com.apple.Stickies.plist. Is that correct?

If so how do I retrieve this text? Is there a tutorial somewhere?

The notes online say that I can open the file in Omni Outliner and then use NVU to convert it to text. How does that work?

When I open the file in Omni Outliner, I get this...

Now what do I do? Any help, or suggestions on how to recover this data, either using the method described above or otherwise, would be helpful.

Thank You.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Aug 5, 2012 5:57 PM

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Answer 1

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seventy one

Level 7

27,430 points

Aug 5, 2012 11:39 PM in response to Dean08

Take a look at Pondini's excellent Time Machine data ...

Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #28 ... which suggests where the file should be ... <home folder>/Library/Stickies database.

<home folder>/L

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Answer 2

Dean08 Author

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Aug 6, 2012 8:47 AM in response to seventy one

Thank you seventy one, but the data I'm looking for was unfortunately not backed up by Time Machine. Neither the old version of the database, nor the current one contains the information, I'm looking for.

I was hoping there was a way to go back to at least a recent version of this text, tucked away somewhere else.

If you, or anyone else, has any further thoughts or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

thank you

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Answer 3

seventy one

Level 7

27,430 points

Aug 6, 2012 9:14 AM in response to Dean08

More an observation than anything, but if your data was written on Pages; I don't think T.M. backs that up anyway. My thought was that you might have written down data and put it in a folder. A folder could well have been traceable.

As a last thought, there is an excellent little app called Easyfind (it is free) in the App store. It will go hunting for files and folders and phrases so it could ascertain if there are vestiges of your data around.

Thank you for the star.

Good hunting.

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Answer 4

Dean08 Author

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Aug 6, 2012 9:51 AM in response to seventy one

Stickies are quick and easy and I haven't had a problem with losing information before. Usually, you can "undo" the delete, but in this case, the delete happened accidently, and I didn't realize it had happened until I had restarted the computer, at which point, there is no "undo".

Everything I've leads me to believe that text for a sticky note is on the sticky itself, in the database and on the plist file and that's it. As it isn't on the sticky or in the the database(new or old), I was hoping to find it in the plist file. But I'm not an expert, so I have no idea if the "old" data is really still in there and if so, how to access it.

Thank you again for your help.

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