lawm.github.io

Apple Notes Backup and Export

Motivation

Time Machine works to backup Apple Notes on macOS, but I also want:

a secondary backup that's easier for me to store in other places
to see the data to be sure it's backed up correctly
have the data in a format that I can transfer to other apps if needed

Steps

Backup your Notes and computer.

Copy your Notes folder to a working directory

mkdir notes-test
cd notes-test

cp -r /Users/$USER/Library/Group\ Containers/group.com.apple.notes ./

Download the tool made by threeplanetssoftware:

git clone https://github.com/threeplanetssoftware/apple_cloud_notes_parser.git

# Or use my branch to skip table parsing and fix linebreaks/indentation:
https://github.com/lawm/apple_cloud_notes_parser

cd apple_cloud_notes_parser
# Install ruby, bundle, and other dependencies
sudo apt-get install build-essential libsqlite3-dev zlib1g-dev git ruby-full ruby-bundler

bundle install

Run the tool to convert from Apple's Notes format to a more readable and portable format.
```
ruby notes_cloud_ripper.rb -m ../group.com.apple.notes
```
The output will include
- output/TIMESTAMP/NoteStore.sqlite
  - plain text sqlite database
  - Read with sqlite3, or other sqlite browsing tool e.g.
```
$ sqlite3 NoteStore.sqlite
sqlite> .tables
sqlite> select * from ZICNOTEDATA;
```
- output/TIMESTAMP/all_notes_1.html
  - HTML version of all the notes
  - Open with a web browser or text editor.
  - Inspect to make sure formatting and other metadata important to you is preserved.
- output/TIMESTAMP/files/
  - attachments and embedded picture files
Now the output/TIMESTAMP folder can be zip'd and backed up to the location of your choice.

github.com/lawm
lawm.github.io