How To Back Up Your Apple Notes

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at different ways that you can backup Notes on your Mac. 

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 2000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/Patreon. There you could read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. 

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.