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

Dear All,


After installing MacOS Sierra, all my Notes stored locally on my MBP are gone. The only Notes in the Notes.app are those stored in iCloud account. Does anyone know how to recover the locally stored Notes in El Capitan?


Thanks

Edmund

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013), macOS Sierra (10.12)

Posted on Sep 21, 2016 10:08 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jul 3, 2017 6:57 AM

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.

47 replies

Jul 12, 2018 5:34 PM in response to Edmund Chan

Guys, did you tried the simplest thing first? Dont get me wrong here, for those who didnt solved the problem yet... maybe this will help:


Open notes, then go to the "view" option, click "show folders". You will see your notes sorted through folders. You will see iCloud - Notes, On My Mac - Notes and if you have a google acc, you will see Google - Notes, etc...


The thing is, that Apple made some changes through some update, that default location for "notes" is on iCloud.


Just hit the notes On My Mac and voila!

Sep 29, 2016 6:22 PM in response to Edmund Chan

Hi Edmund,


If you unfortunately have lost important notes after you upgrade, you have 2 options:


Get them back from a Time Machine backup:


To do so, choose Enter Time Machine from the Time Machine menu, or click Time Machine in the Dock. And use the timeline on the edge of the screen to locate a version of the Notes storage folder that just precedes your deletion. Click Restore to restore the selected file, or Control-click the file for other options. When you next launch the Notes app, your missing notes should reappear.


Get them back from the Storage file:


To recover your lost or deleted notes from storage on Mac, at first, you need to find Notes’ storage location at ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes/. Enter the path string in the Finder’s window. And you will see the Notes folder, inside this folder, you should see a small assortment of similarly named files with names such as NotesV2.storedata.

Copy these files to a separation location, and add an .html extension to them. Then, open one of the files in a web browser, and you will see your current and the deleted or missing notes. At last, copy and save deleted notes to a separate location. And done !


Hope this helps you,


Cheers !

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

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