4/1/24
9:00 am

How To Back Up Your Apple Notes

If you store important information in your Notes app, you'll want to make sure it is backed up. Since notes are stored as a database, not individual files, you'll need to use multiple methods to insure you can recover information in different situations.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at different ways that you can backup Notes on your Mac. 
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Now more and more people are using the Notes App on their Mac and across other Apple devices to store important information. But the thing about Notes is it's actually pretty easy to loose a note. You can accidentally delete a note or some information in a note and find that there is really no good way to get it back. So let's look at all the different ways that you are and should be backing up notes and how to use them. 
Okay,, so the first thing is that if you keep your notes in iCloud, which I'm sure most people are, then you've got a little bit of backup protection. So here in the Notes App if I go to Settings, and then look under Default Account, I can see I've got iCloud here. I think most people use Notes this way. Storing your notes in iCloud is not technically a backup. But it does actually keep your notes in another location besides just your computer. So in a case like your computer is lost or stolen or breaks you don't loose your notes. You can look on another Apple device, like an iPhone, and you can see the same notes there as long as you're logged into the same iCloud account. When you replace your Mac you log into your iCloud account and your notes should then appear in the Notes App. 
So by storing your notes in iCloud you're protected against a lot of typical disaster type situations. But the more common thing that happens is you accidentally delete a note. So let's say you've got an important note like this and you just press the Delete key. There it goes. It's deleted! Maybe you do that without realizing it just as you're switching to another app. The note seems to be gone. But you do have kind of a trashcan functionality inside of Notes. If you look on the left you can see Recently Deleted. It only appeared there when I deleted this note. Now if I go to it I can see that the note is there. I can see a warning that it will be deleted after a certain amount of time. I can simply just drag and drop it, like that, and it's back. You can even go to iCloud.com, look for your Notes widget here or click on it here and then go into the web-based Notes App and you'll find Recently Deleted there as well and be able to restore this note in the same way. Just drag it back to Notes. Now you can see it's back there and it will update on your other devices as well. So you do have a little bit of protection of accidentally deleting a file as long as you act within 30 days. 
What you don't have is protection against deleting something inside a note. So, for instance, in here if I accidentally delete a section of a note, like this, just using the Delete Key you can see it's gone. Now I can temporarily use Command Z or Edit, Undo, to undo my mistake. But note that if I were to delete it, I'm going to use Command X to cut it right there, switch to another note and then back, then Command Z or Edit, Undo doesn't actually work. So it is fairly easy to accidentally delete some important information in a note and not be able to get it back. 
Now another way to backup your Notes is something hopefully you're already doing. Using Time Machine. So when you use Time Machine it's for backing up all of the information on your Mac and indeed Notes is included there. But here's the thing about Notes. They are not individual files. We're used to using apps like Pages or TextEdit where a document is actually saved as a file. You can see it in the Finder. But these notes are nowhere to be found as individual files. That's because Notes is not the type of app that opens documents and allows you to edit documents. Instead it is a database of information. So, while these look like separate things here all of it is actually put together in one database and that's kind of hidden from you on your Mac. If you really want to know where it is you can use the Go Menu in the Finder and hold down the Option Key and then go to your User Library. Then in your User Library look for Group Containers. In there then go to root.com.Apple and look for Notes. That's where your Notes database is located. So if I go into here I can see all the different files that make up your Notes. You're not going to see individual files for each note. In fact most of the information is stored here in this NotesStore.sqlite file which is a database type file. So there is nothing in here for you to actually open up or read in any other way than accessing it in Notes. But since this entire thing is a folder on your drive that means when you're using Time Machine it does get backed up in Time Machine. 
So, for instance, if I were to activate Time Machine by going to the Time Machine icon here in my Menu Bar and browse Time Machine backups I could see a history of what's in this folder. So for instance I can go back to the previous version using this arrow here and you could see how, before I added a few notes before making this tutorial it was much smaller and the last modified date was different. I can actually go back further in Time if I want and I could, if I wanted to, restore all of the files here in this folder. As a matter of fact the thing to do would actually be to go up a level here and use Time Machine at this level and then restore this entire folder. Now this is dangerous because it is rolling back your Notes to a previous version. That means any notes that you've altered or added since then will be removed or go back to their original state. So it is not a good idea to use this to simply get information from one note, where you deleted some things. It will take your notes back in time. So it is great for a complete disaster where you've lost all of your notes and you can't get them back anymore. You can go back to say yesterday and restore this folder and then hopefully that will get you your notes back. 
But there are some interesting things about this folder. Note here I've got an Accounts Folder. If I look in that Accounts Folder under this first folder here, I only have one account, so this must be my iCloud Account. If I look under Media I can see all these smaller folders here. If I look closely under each one I might be able to find Graphics there. So by looking in your Time Machine backup you may be able to find Graphics, or pdf's that accidentally got deleted that are there in older versions of the Notes Folder. It's kind of highly technical to be able to look in here and find these things but at least you've got some hope if, say, you've accidentally deleted a pdf that was in a note and you really need to get it back. 
Alright, so let's take a look at another way to backup your notes. One that actually will create files that you could easily then see and maybe recover data from one particular note if you need to. So to do that we're going to use a shortcut. I'm going to launch the Shortcuts App and I'm going to create a new shortcut here and call this Backup Notes. So the first thing I want to do is pick a folder where the backup will go. So I want to create something in my Documents Folder. I'm going to create a new folder here and I want to call this Notes Backup. Alright, so the first action we want to add is we want to Find Notes. So one of the many things you can do with Notes is to just get them and we're going to use Find Notes to get all notes, no filters, we don't need to Sort, we don't need to Limit. We just want to get all the notes. Now we're going to loop through each one of them. So I'm going to do a Repeat and use Repeat with Each. Repeat with each item in Notes. Now what I want to do is Name them using not just the title but also the date. So then if you have two notes that have the same title, like Morning Meeting, it's not copying one over the other. So we're going to get Details Of, and we're going to look for Get Details Of Files. Now this is a misleading name because it gets details of lots of things. So what detail do we want? We want to get the Creation Date of the Repeat Item. So now that we've got that we want to format so it looks good as a file name. So, I'm going to search for Format Date and I'm going to add that right after this so it will take the output from this Format the Creation Date, Show More. We're going to do a custom date format. It's going to give us an example here. We're going to erase that and we're going to do lower case y's for a four digit year. Two capital MM's for a two digit month. It has to be capital M's. Lower case m's will give you minutes. Two lower case dd's. I'm going to put dashes between those. So that is the format string for that. That will give us the date. 
Now we're going to go and use the Key Action, make pdf. So we're going to Make PDF, not from the formatted date here. I'm going to Control Click here, two-finger click on a trackpad, right click on a mouse. Change that and instead have it do the Repeat Item. So Make a PDF from each note and then we're going to Save File and we're going to put that after this. It's going to take the input, the pdf here, save the pdf. We're going to go to Show More and we're going to turn off  Ask Where To Save. Instead of Save PDF to Shortcuts, I'm going to click there and I'm going to select this Notes Backup Folder. I'm also going to check Overwrite If File Exists. This will make sure that every time we run it it's not going to refuse to save a copy because one is already there. 
Now the subpath allows us to have a Name here. So we've gotten the Creation Date. We want to start with that. So I'm going to Control Click in here, Insert Variable, and say I want the formatted date. Not the original creation date but the one that we formatted. Then a space and then I'm going to Control Click again and Insert Variable and what I want to do is say The Repeat Item. But it is going to say, well the repeat item doesn't make sense here. But maybe a part of it does. Like the Name. So I'm going to select Name. Now we've got the subpath, or the Name is going to be Formatted Date, space, name of the note. Now I've got the Notes Backup Folder open here and here's the shortcut. So I'm going to run this. I'm actually, instead of going to use the Play button here I'm going to go to the Information here for the shortcut and make sure I check Pin in Menu Bar. That will add it here and now I can trigger it here without actually having the Shortcuts App open. I'll leave it here so you can actually see it run. 
Another thing you may want to do is make sure that Notes is actually Open when you're running this. You can even add something here at the beginning to Open the app Notes. I find that sometimes you get an error if you haven't yet used Notes or haven't used it recently. So, we're going to go and run this and you'll see it populate the Notes backup with all these PDF's. The first time you run this it is going to ask for permission to make sure it can write these files. We're going to say Okay. You can see it populates all these pdf's here as it goes through. 
Now we've got a pdf for each note. Actually look at one of these here, like I'll open this one, you can see didn't include the image. So images are not included when you shortcut to export. But things like Tables are. You cans the bullet items and everything else there. Sketches, pdf's, all of that aren't saved as part of this. So it is not a great way to save a complete note like that. But it will give you the ability to say if you accidentally deleted a section of a note you can go here to your backup and Copy out of it and Paste back into a note. So a combination of having your notes in iCloud, using a Time Machine Backup, and occasionally backing up using a shortcut like this will really protect you pretty well against data loss in Notes. 
But here are a few more methods that work on just individual notes. Sometimes we just have a few notes that are really important or maybe after a, say, taking notes at a meeting or in a class you want to really backup this one note that's now complete. Well, you don't have to use a shortcut to save it out as a pdf. You can do it by selecting the note, and then going to File, Export as PDF. When you do this and you save it, I'm going to save it to the Desktop, you get a PDF that does indeed include images. You can see the image at the bottom of this note is there. It includes the Table and everything else. So it is a more complete PDF version of the note. 
Another way to do it is you move to File and then Open in Pages. What this will do is it will create a new Pages document and take all of the information from Notes and include it in that document. Since Pages has even more advanced editing features than Notes, it's going to include everything. Here I've got the Table and I've got the image. Everything is there, no problem. I can continue to edit it and work with it. 
But let's say you want something a little more compacted than that. You can create a TextEdit document. I'm going to create a new one here. I'm going to make sure it is set to Rich Text since I use plain text as my default I need to switch it here. Now I see all the stuff at the top. I know which Rich Text. Select the note and you Command A to select All, Command C to Copy and Command V to Paste In. It is going to ask to convert it to RTFD if you've got images in it. So I'll say yes I want to convert to it to that. Now I've got a very complete note here with images and it will include Tables and all sorts of other things saved as a TextEdit document. I'll just do Command S here. This should take up less space than a Pages document or even a pdf and it is still editable as a TextEdit Document. 
So there are a whole variety of ways to backup your notes or archive them if you wish. Which one of these you use depends on you. Create a strategy that works best to meet your needs. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 34 Responses to “How To Back Up Your Apple Notes”

Karen

8 months ago

Thanks for this video! I followed your steps exactly to make the shortcut, but I got this error message: "Couldn't communicate with a helper application." I had Notes open. Any ideas?

Gary Rosenzweig

8 months ago

Karen: Try a restart. And launch Notes first before running the Shortcut.

Simon Jones

8 months ago

Hi Garry, I’m in the UK. Is there any chance you could make the shortcut available for download. I back up saving as pdfs and this is so time consuming. I also have Time Machine running and periodically back up the system files. I’ve trined the shortcut by taking a screen shot of your process and it just won’t work. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Love your content and learn so much even being a Mac User since 1989. Best Regards Simon.

Karen

8 months ago

No luck with a restart – too bad! It seems like a great system for keeping copies of notes. I do have Time Machine running and I use iCloud, so I'm not overly worried about losing them. I'll leave it for now – too many other things to do, but I appreciate you trying. :)

Gary Rosenzweig

8 months ago

Simon: What happens when you try it?

Azer

8 months ago

Thank you for this Gary. I tried replicating your shortcut step by step and I’m getting a failed message, even after restarting and having notes running.

Any chance you can share a download link for your shortcut?

Thanks for all your tutorials, they’re great!

Bob

8 months ago

Thanks, Gary:
Works well. I didn’t realise I had so many notes!

Gary Rosenzweig

8 months ago

Azer: What does the message say exactly?

Azer

8 months ago

Thank you for the reply Gary. It said something to the extent of “failed to run shortcut” but I think it might’ve had to do with my backup location being on an external drive.

I changed the location to my local drive and it works perfectly.

Thanks again, this is a great timesaver!

Karen

8 months ago

I played around a bit more with this today and got it to work by selecting an advanced setting in Shortcuts to "Allow Sharing Large Amounts of Data" – yay!

Christopher

8 months ago

Thanks for this Gary, really helpful. Quick question; wouldn't it be possible to automate a daily backup of this shortcut using, well, a new shortcut program? Just wondering... Thanks again in any case. ☃️

John Perry

8 months ago

This was very relevant Gary. Have you a video on Notes which I can purchase?

Gary Rosenzweig

8 months ago

Christopher: There is a third-party app named Shortery you can get that I think allows scheduling like that.

Gary Rosenzweig

8 months ago

John: I have lots of free videos here at the site. No course that is just about Notes though if that is what you mean.

Bob

8 months ago

As usual a great tutorial. I followed the Shortcut to back up as PdF's to a folder. The first time I ran it I got a pop up saying "this action is trying to share 210 Notes items. which is not allowed. you can allow this in Preferences*.

*Side note: this is actually NOT Preferences but Shortcuts SETTINGS/Advanced. The inconsistency in nomenclature is not a good look Apple.

John Perry

8 months ago

Yes just about Notes and getting the best out of it. Since I asked I have seen that notes is part of the macOS Sonoma video but I am not sure how much detail you go into there.

Bob Fahrenholtz

8 months ago

Hi Gary! Thanks for sharing these suggestions. I created the shortcut. For some reason, it didn't work with the Creation Date but does when I use Last Modified Date. That actually gives some version control. Fortunately, the majority of my notes don't change frequently so it shouldn't be a space/file management issue. I also needed to change Shortcut > Settings > Advanced > to Allow Sharing Large Amounts of Data to get past an error message. Thanks again!

Bill Roberts

8 months ago

Thank you for this video. As I have folders, I added a folder to the pdf file name. I also have subfolders. Is there a variable that hold the Note path?

Gary Rosenzweig

8 months ago

Bill: You can try to build a path in a Text "action" and then use that in subpath. Or, you can build the whole thing in the subpath field. I haven't built a version of this to do folders, so I'm not sure what it would look like in the end exactly.

Clinton Hayes

8 months ago

Thanks Gary. This is really useful.

Gabe D.

8 months ago

Hi Gary, thanks for the great videos. I tried this shortcut exactly; however, no pdfs were created. Right above Save PDF to NOTES BACKUP subpath Format Date Name, there is a red notification: "You can allow this in Preferences". Any suggestions? Thanks again!!

Gary Rosenzweig

8 months ago

Gabe: Shortcuts, Settings, Advanced, Allow Sharing Large Amounts of Data.

Gabe D.

8 months ago

Thanks Gary, Worked perfectly!

Pat (Ireland)

8 months ago

Hi Gary. The shortcut seems to get thrown off by special characters! I have some Notes created with a title beginning with the special character _. It saves the title line but ignores the rest of the Note. I also notice that if it encounters a Note title with the special character /, it creates a sub-folder with that title.
Any tips to eliminate this ‘feature’ without re-naming the Notes in question? Thanks, Pat.

Pat (Ireland)

8 months ago

Hi Gary. I should have complimented you on the Shortcut. Very well done and a great Notes backup solution. Pat.
PS. The underscore problem only occurs if the next character is a numeral.

Dave Simpson

8 months ago

Hi Gary. Thanks for this tutorial, it works fine for me.
One thought I had was to add the media folder to the backup process.
Whilst the images won't be linked to the Notes you will at least still have them.
Depending on how large your media folder is, it may be necessary to compress it.
Dave

Gary Rosenzweig

8 months ago

Pat: You can see why the / would create a folder as that's what is used in file paths. So your options are to either eliminate those characters from your Notes titles if you plan to backup this way, or to expand on the Shortcut by modifying the Notes title before you use it as a filename to remove some characters.

Geoff Ralph

8 months ago

I found this video so clear but I would like to know how it handles Locked notes as many of mine have have personal data that I want to keep secret eg PIN for bank card, Medical details etc. Any advice please?

Gary Rosenzweig

8 months ago

Geoff: I believe if your Locked notes are locked, it doesn't include them. If they are unlocked it does. But test and see. But what is your concern as the files you are saving would be in your storage, in your Mac user account, right? And that is protected with your user account password. I suppose you could also enhance the Shortcut with an IF statement that checks for a character or word (like "private") in the title and skips those.

Jose Vasquez

6 months ago

Re: Books App
I tried this for the Notes App and it worked! I wanted to do the same for Books App as well for my PDFs I have stored there. I quickly realized that I just have to Select All and drag to a folder of my choosing. No need to run a shortcut for PDFs in Books. But, even easier, I bet those PDFs in Books are in some folder in the Library anyway.

Jose Vasquez

6 months ago

I'm wondering if a shortcut can be created for Pages and Text Edit documents in order to batch create PDFs of those files.

Gary Rosenzweig

6 months ago

Jose: But why would you want to create PDFs in a batch for backup? Just backup the files you already have. No need for the extra steps that would just give you versions of the documents that would be less editable.

Jose Vasquez

6 months ago

I feel that PDFs are like having a printed copy of a file, but I guess that's probably not the case. I was once unable to open an important document in a third-party app, which turned out to be corrupted, and I wished I had a PDF backup of it. But, you make a good point. So, with this Notes shortcut, could it be modified to export .txt files instead of PDFs?

Gary Rosenzweig

6 months ago

Jose: Yes, you could just get it as text. I think backing up Notes as PDFs is a good idea since there is no such thing as a Notes "document." Put Pages and TextEdit documents are already files. Just back up those files. Time Machine does it for you.

How To Back Up Your Apple Notes

Comments: 34 Responses to “How To Back Up Your Apple Notes”

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