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

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.

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?

Similar problem.

I have a note that somehow has a PDF where years of text used to be, leaving just a few lines at the top of the note, then everything else gone.

Every time I restore from Time Machine, the Notes app shows me the current data, whether I'm connected to the internet or not.

I restored from Time Machine of 5 days ago, the PDF that was only created last night, is still in the same place.

I've opened the files with Safari - the note in question isn't in any of the data files. And the Last Modified dates on the files are all October last year.

Is the User folder location of Notes data folder shown in the Solved My Problem post correct?

I tried following your advice several times. However, after everything is done, I re-open Notes and find the latest version again (it won't recover the older version from time-machine).

I am using iOs Sierra.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

U.Sa.

These locations seem to store only old notes that were saved to Mac, before enabling Notes syncing (and creating) in iCloud.

Is there a different location where Sierra stores local copies on notes stored in iCloud? I need to use Time Machne to restore a note that disappeared and is not in the files noted above.

There is one other location you can look:

~/Library/CoreData/ExternalRecords

I believe the iCloud notes are stored in: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes/

Problem with trying to restore iCloud notes is they get deleted once you restore them. I've seen where others have said you need to do this offline, then save the notes elsewhere.

Actually, you should also look here:

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

This will produce different results than the first I gave you and probably will actually contain the iCloud data.

Thanks, I'll give the first and third suggestions a try.

The second location seems to only store notes made before the app was changed to move to iCloud storage. Only very old notes there.

I've seen the warning about being off-line when restoring. I actually just added a suffix to see and read the Note files in Safari.

Appreciate the response.

I didn't think you would get anything out of them. The 2 locations I gave first are where the database files are kept for iCloud and Local notes. I don't know why you can't get anything from them, but then iCloud notes seem to be hard to recover. There are many conversations on this on the discussion site. Maybe keep looking and someone might have a solution that will work for you.

For my iCloud notes, they are located:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes/NotesV6.storedata-wal

I can open that file and see all my notes in iCloud. That location should be where you need to retrieve them from TM. But there doesn't appear to be an easy way to accomplish this.

I managed to restore the missing note! For the benefit of others, here's how.

I had the foresight to archive the iTunes backup made days before the disappearance. Made a fresh backup. Turned AirPlane Mode on and restored my iPhone from the older backup. The missing note reappeared in Notes app. Apple says that backups do not include files that are otherwise synced via iCloud, but that, apparently, is not true. All 500 of my notes were recoverable from the backup.

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.