Q: Recover Emails and Notes

A

Please bring the Mail browser window forward, then enter Time Machine. You'll see a series of Mail windows cascading back in time, each representing a snapshot of the Mail database.

Scroll back to the most recent snapshot containing the messages you want to restore. Select the messages, or select a whole mailbox, then click Restore. The messages will be restored to a new mailbox named "com.apple.Mail.backup" in the On My Mac group. From there you can move them wherever you like.

If you don't see the restored messages, position the cursor over the On My Mac heading in the mailbox list. An element Show or Hide will appear to the right of the heading. If it's Show, click it.

Depending on how many mailboxes you have, you may have to scroll the mailbox list up or down to see the new entry.

According to some reports, you might have to relaunch Mail, or perhaps wait a while for the database to be reindexed, before it shows up. I can't confirm those reports.

B

This procedure will revert the whole Notes database to a previous version. It's not possible to restore individual notes.

Please quit the Notes application if it's running.

1. Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes

Right-click or control-click the highlighted line and select

          Services ▹ Reveal in Finder (or just Reveal)

from the contextual menu.* A folder should open with an item named "com.apple.Notes" selected. Move the selected item to the Trash, then restore it from a backup that predates the unwanted change. If you back up with Time Machine, enter it and select the snapshot from which you want to restore.

2. Do as in Step 1 with this line:

~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes

This time the selected item will be "group.com.apple.notes", or you may get an alert that the item doesn't exist. If the latter happens, skip this step.

3. Log out or restart the computer and empty the Trash. Launch Notes. You may see a "Welcome to Notes" splash screen, as if you had never launched it before. Click Continue.

4. If you synchronize Notes with iCloud or another network service, the notes you restored may be immediately deleted after you restore them. In that case, temporarily disconnect from the Internet, for example by turning off your broadband adapter, and restore again. Copy the contents of each note to a document in another application, such as TextEdit. Reconnect to the Internet. If the notes are deleted, recreate them from the TextEdit document. They should then synchronize to the network.

*If you don't see the contextual menu item, copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. In the Finder, select

          Go ▹ Go to Folder...

from the menu bar and paste into the box that opens by pressing command-V. You may not see what you pasted because a line break is included. Press return.