4/1/20
9:00 am

Export All Of The Notes On Your Mac Using a Script

In Mac Notes you can only export one note at a time as a PDF file. With the help of a script, you can quickly and easily export all of your notes to html files as a backup or archive. You can also save notes this way to clear out your Notes app.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to can export your notes using a script.
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Recently I did a video on how to export your Reminders using a script. This is important because there's really no way to export or even copy and paste reminders out of the Reminders app in Catalina. Now Notes is a little bit better. You can certainly export a single note. As a matter of fact you can do it as a pdf and get a really good copy of it. But you could only do it one at a time. So if you have a lot of notes it's very difficult if you want to export all your notes just to back them up. So here's a script that will easily export all of your notes as html files.
Here's the script in Script Editor. Script Editor is on your Mac and it just lets you write scripts. Kind of like Automator but all you're doing is actually scripting and it's more powerful because of that. Anything you do in Script Editor though you can actually do in Automator by using Action that's a script action. In this case I'm using Java Script not Apple Script. So I created a new document here and I switched to Java Script so I can use the more modern programming language rather than the old Apple Script. 
Here's what the script looks like. At the beginning I'm defining two variables that are apps. The first one is the current application. So Script Editor since I'm going to run this in Script Editor. Then there's the Notes app which I'm specifically saying I want the application Notes right here. In both I'm including Standard Additions which means I can actually control them. Now the first thing I want to do is choose which notes out of all the notes I've got. So I'm saying variable notes is going to equal the notes app and all notes in it which is a property called dot notes.Then  I'm going to use a choose from list for my main app which is Script Editor app.choose from list then I'm going to get that list here of notes but just the names. I'm going to have a prompt which isn't really that important. But I am going to allow multiple selections. So you can select one or many of the items listed. This is important because mostly we want to use this to export all notes.
Then I'm going to check to see if I actually got a value back. If not it means I click the cancel button so don't continue any further. Now I'm going to prompt again for choose folder. So choose a location of where to save these. I'm going to save that in a save where variable. I'm going to check to make sure I got a value for that. If not it's because I hit cancel so it won't do anything after this. Now I'm going to loop through all the notes. Not the notes I selected but all of the notes in the Notes app. For each one I'm going to compare it to my list of notes that I've selected.
So the prompt that I had asking for all the notes I'm going to compare it using index of. So it's going to look in those notes that I selected and get the index of. Now if the index of is not found it will return negative one. So if it's not one of the notes I selected in the list I'll get a negative one. I'm going to look for something greater than negative one which means it is in the notes that I've selected. This will be true for every single one if I chose to export all notes. But if I only chose to export some notes then this would only be true for those that I selected in the list.
Then I'm going to do a simple save file. So I'm going to create a file name that's going to be the location of where I selected up here. Then it's going to take the name of the note and I'm going append dot html to the end of it since they are going to be html files. Then I'm going to create a new file. Open it up with that path that file name there and set write permission to true. Now when Java Script does this in Script Editor it's going to start writing the file at the beginning but it won't clear it out. So you need to do this. You need to set the end of file to zero. So in other words clear the file out. So for doing it for the second time we want it to clear out the notes and create new files. Not overwrite what's in the note which may make a mess. It will write it out and close the file. That's all that we need to do.
So if we run this it's going to show me a list of all my notes. I can select them individually. I can use the command key to select multiple ones. I can Shift to select a range or I can do Command A to select them all. So Command A selects them all. I click OK and hit Return. It's going to ask for a location. Let's go and save it to the Desktop but I'm going to create a new folder since this is the first time I'm running it. Now I'll hit Create and then I'm in that folder now. I'll select Choose to choose that as the location. It will Export them all out. You saw it running there for a second. I'm going to Hide it and there's my exported Notes folder.
I go into that I could see all of those html files. I could look at each one. Hit the spacebar to QuickLook with it and there's that one. I'll arrow down to the next one and you could see each one there. Now note it's exporting as html. It's going to look a little different than what's in the Notes but it is going to preserve some of the formatting. As a matter of fact you'll even see some attachments but not all. You'll even see things like tables in there. So html is a good format to export to. It's not going to be perfect but it will create a good backup and a way to copy and paste out of that if you need to recover something in an old note.
One thing to note is that titles for each of these notes need to be good files names. So if you have dots or slashes or something in the titles here then you're going to get error messages. So make sure the first line of each note is something nice and clean because that's going to be the file name.
So in Script Editor if you go to Window, Library and then in Library you go to Notes there, double click on that, it will open up the Library for Notes. Switch to Java Script and click Notes Suite. This shows you all the different things that you could do in Notes inside of Java Script. So note here here's that Note Object that we're using in the script. That's where I got body from, right there. But you could see there's also plain test. So if you want to export as plain test and save as txt files instead of dot html that's how you can do it. 
Now if I wanted to I could Export this and save it out as an Application. So I'm going to put that on the Desktop. Save it out. Then I'm going to Hide Script Editor there. I'm going to try running this one here and it asks for permissions because this is the first time this application has been run. So I'll hit OK. I can still select everything. Then it's going to ask for a new location. Let me create a new folder and I'll save it out there. You could see it worked just as well as a stand alone application. It's just easier to have it sometimes as a script in Script Editor so that you can easily modify it and play around with it as your needs evolve.
Since these are html files when you double click on them they open up in Safari which is fine and easy enough to copy and paste or view them. This is a great way to ensure that your data is saved and go back to older notes you may have deleted. But it's not great for restoring notes if you've lost them all. Still it's good to know that your data is saved and you can access it in case of a problem. It's also a handy way to export a bunch of notes to clean out your Notes app with notes you don't need anymore but you want to make sure you have an archive of them before you delete them.

Here is the code:

// set things up
var app = Application.currentApplication();
app.includeStandardAdditions = true;
var notesApp = Application('Notes');
notesApp.includeStandardAdditions = true;

// choose which notes
var notes = notesApp.notes;
var whichNotes = app.chooseFromList(notes.name(), { withPrompt: "Which Notes?", multipleSelectionsAllowed: true });


if (whichNotes) {

	// choose save location
	var saveWhere = app.chooseFolder().toString();
	
	if (saveWhere) {
	
		// loop through all notes
		for(var i=0; i<notes.length; i++) {
		
			// is this note one to be exported?
			if (whichNotes.indexOf(notes[i].name()) > -1) {
			
				// save file as html
				var filename = saveWhere+"/"+notes[i].name()+".html";
				var file = app.openForAccess(Path(filename), { writePermission: true });
				app.setEof(file, { to: 0 });
				app.write(notes[i].body(), {to: file});
				app.closeAccess(file);
			}
		}
	}
}

Note: If you have more than one Notes account, or use “On My Mac” notes in addition to iCloud notes, then this could fail because the .notes property gives an array of objects, not a single object. You can substitute this line for the “var notes =” line to narrow down by account.

var notes = notesApp.accounts.byName('iCloud').notes;

Then just change the ‘iCloud’ to ‘On My Mac” to get those notes instead.

Comments: 49 Responses to “Export All Of The Notes On Your Mac Using a Script”

Eric

5 years ago

Great tutorial Gary, thank you. Question regarding locked and/or pinned notes. How does this script affect those if at all?

Comments: 49 Responses to “Export All Of The Notes On Your Mac Using a Script”

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