How to retrieve all lost Mac note after update to EI Capitan?

Friday, 10 June 2016 00:00 | Written by Bradley Taylor | E-mail

Do you upgrade your Mac to the latest EI Capitan? Have you noticed that your all note lost when you open the Note.app again after the upgrade has completed. I was trapped in the problem and found many people are facing this situation. Let us go straight to the process.

In the event of lost, all notes stored in the iCloud is safe, but those you choose to store in your Mac disk are all lost. It seems that Apple told users, iCloud is a better choice than Mac disk. But in fact, Update the note data must exist a problem in somewhere during the upgrade process.

lost Mac notes

All you need to know

As more and more functions be added into Note.app on iOS system, in order to keep the iCloud synchnization between iOS and Mac OS X, note.app on Mac also joined many functions. Such as rich text, password protect, insert photos and media files, add toolbar on top of window and so on. It becomes a powerful recording tool, not a simple text recording tool as before.

Where is the Note stored on the Mac?

Before EI Capitan:

/Users/~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes/

old database location

EI Capitan:

/Users/~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/CoreData/ExternalRecords/NotesV4/7B7A6F46-ACEF-47D3-B44C-281F66BE0422/ICNote/_records/0/

new database location

Why local note lost during this upgrade to EI Caption

I guess that there are two reasons may cause the lost.

1. As the database structure in new version of the Note on EI Caption has a little different from the old version.The records of database may be covered or rewritten during the process of rebuliding new database.

new database location

2. Whether you have noticed that the stored location is under the containers, where is the sandbox internal data on Mac OS X. It may be accidentally emptied as the cache data during the upgrade process.

How to restore your lost Notes?

There is no way to recover lost notes from original database, including using data recovery software, when it happened in this situation. The only way that you have already made an backup with Time Machine or other backup tool before upgrade to EI Caption.

Retrieve your lost Notes from Time Machine

1. Connect external backup hard drive with your Mac computer, Click "Enter Time Machine"

2. Select the backup date point, enter /Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes/, NotesV2.storedata contains all the note records.

point time machine

3. Copy NotesV2.storedata database then Click "Cancel" button to quit Time Machine.

point time machine

4. Paste the database and store in a location on your computer.

It's a sqlite database, so you need a sqlite tool like sqlitebrowser to open it. It will list your all notes.

Some people suggest that change the name of NotesV2.storedata to NotesV6.storedata, then copy to the current note database location, all the old records will appear in Note.app. I have done it, but failed. I think that the new version of Note has a different stored.

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