MacOS Sierra deleted my local Notes on my MBP. How to recover them?

I thought my Notes were gone too, but it was just an interface change. I don’t store my notes in iCloud and the default location to display is iCloud. It looked like I had no notes, but by going to View -> Show Folders and then selecting "On My Mac", I got them to display. I then chose View -> Hide Folders to get it looking like it did before.

You might want to consider starting a new discussion. Since this one is marked solved, less people are likely to look at it. A new post would be much more visible. You can link to this one.

Didn't work for me on this High Sierra instal, if i used time machine it garbled something about you cannot delete or change notes, if i press the ctrl+click and save it, it then errors when

attempting to open it. Second option, just spews out a load of gobbledygook characters resembling nothing i wrote in my notes. So lost a load of passwords i needed because Apple once again goes below the levels of Microsoft! Poor poor poor. Utter shitness!

By restore, you mean they had to have been backed up (icloud or time machine) in order to recover them? I hadn't done that when I upgraded to High Sierra, and now I think I may have permanently lost the files. 😢

Hi! your method is really works! but could you help me with my problem? because in my case it works for half: I am writing my notes in russian so when I have done with my HTML file I saw something like encrypted web page like this

\–Є –Љ–∞—Е–∞–ї–∞ –ї–∞–њ–Ї–Њ–є —Б–њ–∞—Б–Є–±—Г. –Т–°–Б –Э–Х –Ґ–Ю. –њ–Њ—В–Њ–Љ—Г —З—В–Њ –ѓ –Э–Х –Ч–Э–Р–Ѓ –Ґ–Т–Ю–Х–У–Ю –°–¶–Х–Э–Р–†–Ш–ѓ.

–љ–µ —Е–Њ—З—Г –Ј–љ–∞—В—М.

–≤—Б—С.

У8Зc ¶c ь

13.11.2015 01.17

please help me to decode this my file or could you give me some advice how can I decode this page and wich code Apple Inc. use for encript notes in other (russion) language?

Thank You!

It looks like you are reading it in the wrong encoding, namely MacCyrillic. If you read it in UTF-8 Unicode (View > Text Encoding in a browser), you should get "\и махала лапкой спасибу. ВСЁ НЕ ТО. потому что Я НЕ ЗНАЮ ТВОЕГО СЦЕНАРИЯ. не хочу знать. всё."

thank you very much for your quick answer!

I was trying to decode my notes to UTF-8 Unicode in that way you adviced (View > Text Encoding>UTF-8 Unicode) but saw decoded text in another way. please could you give an advice how did you decode that text?

Thank You!

blossomingsmile wrote:

could you give an advice how did you decode that text?

I copy/pasted what you posted here in the forum into TextEdit and saved it with MacCyrillic encoding. Then I changed the .txt to .html in the file name and opened it with Safari with View > Encoding set to UTF-8.

I did exactly as you said and I tried to save my document in the textedit but couldnt change encoding to MacCyrillic. I received warning from mac-I cant save that text in the MacCyrillic encoding. please help me!

Hi there,

I have just created a new post about this, but I wanted to link it here and I am not sure how to do this, so I'll just paste a link to it My Notes disappeared, how can I read the "storedata" files?

In short, I'm trying to recover my Notes using these steps, and I have found the "NotesV7.storedata" and "NoteStore.sqlite" files. However, when opening these files as html in my browser, all I can see is text like:

"> *  A ”[ > %  ”Z >* $ ”Y > * Œ € ”X >* ‹ ”W > * ‹ ”V > % Š ”U >* Š$ ”T > * Š A ”S > * ‰ ”R >"

Why do you think that I'm unable to read these files correctly? Any suggestions?

The files to restore are:

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

NoteStore.sqlite

NoteStore.sqlite-shm

NoteStore.sqlite-wal

Others have success with these files:

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

Notes/NotesV6.storedata

NotesV6.storedata-shm

Notes/NotesV6.storedata-wal

Local notes are stored in the first as far as I remember.

I found these files, but they don't seem to have the notes in them.

Hej

This is an awesome answer! But how does one make it a html?

You sir are a hero!