Getting back Notes 4.3 Files

Hi everyone

This gets a little confusing but here goes…

Recently, I helped my wife’s old MacAir to upgrade from Yosemite to High Sierra. I made sure everything is backed up on Time Machine and also on iCloud.

After the upgrade, she found out that her Notes from her Mac was gone. I could not find them in the iCloud. I followed instructions to copy old Notes files from TimeMachine but that still did not work.

It turned out that she kept her iOS up to date, along with iCloud, and her Notes app from MacOS Air did not sync with iCloud for a while. So even though her Notes app showed them in “iCloud Notes” rather than “On This Mac”, it was stored on the local machine, not iCloud. However, when I tried to copy the Notes files, I managed to get what were in “On This Mac” but not what was under “iCloud” (but in fact was on the local machine). The notes must be somewhere on that Time Machine, but I cannot find a way to get to them.

At this point, I can think of a few options:

1. I know that Notes apps in High Sierra and Yosemite have different structures. But somehow, convert the Yosemite version of Notes (4.3) completely to the new Notes.

2. Find a third party app that can read an old version of Notes structure.

3. Downgrade the Mac from High Sierra to Yosemite, restore from Notes, export the contents to text files and then reinstall High Sierra.

None of them seem to be trivial, but I would do it, if it is possible. I cannot find ways so far. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

Andy