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

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 !

Tried this with apple support and the NOTES are all missing. The latest Mac OS Sierra security update made all my notes disappear. Cannot restore from Time Machine backup either. What a nightmare!!!!!

Same here. Edmund's solution helped me recover one note, but I am still missing a very important one.

Am very sad 😢

Hello !

I was looking for this solution for lost notes since ages , and it really help me .

The second half of your answer get them back from the storage file was excellent .

Seriously I have copied and pasted your answer in my important folder .

You are really brainy .

Thanks !

Hello,

After trying the second method, i am only getting one old note and All other old notes are not showing.

It would be great if you could help in getting all other notes as well.

Thanks.

This is definitely worth keeping to those who uses Notes on a daily basis like myself, just in case 🙂

Thanks!

I cannot find that link in Finder, been trying for hours,

After I added the HTML extension and tried to open it with Chrome, it just downloaded the file...

Did I do something wrong? What do I do?

just wiped my local notes - looked in the local storage and the files just contain garbage/code. Thanks Apple!

where is this Note storage folder in time machine?

Thanks Glenn,

The first option (GroupContainers) did the miracle.

What a relief!

U.Sa.

You're Welcome

Update:

The CoreData locations contain a lot of folders, but they're all empty of content.

Looked so promising, but in the end that location contained only the same few notes as all the others.

Thanks again for trying to help!