Gen ius Tips

Howard Oakley solves all your Mac hardware, software and iOS issues

Q

I deleted important text from one of my notes, but didn’t notice until I had closed the app, so couldn’t use the Undo command. Where can I find an earlier version or backup? by Phil Thompson

A

Unlike many of Apple’s productivity apps, Notes doesn’t save your work in document files, but inside its own database. This means you can’t step back to a previous version of a note by browsing all versions with the File > Revert To feature. In document-based apps, that’s the easy way to recover accidentally deleted material.

Calendar and some other apps enable you to browse previous versions of their databases and selectively restore info by entering Time Machine while they are the foreground app. Sadly, this isn’t possible in Notes. Also, the app’s Recently Deleted folder is only useful for wholly scrapped items.

You’re left with a fiddlier option: roll back Notes’ whole database temporarily. If Notes syncs with a cloud service, go offline. Next, get Time Machine to make a backup. When that’s complete, enter Time Machine, go to the time the desired content was present, then restore the contents of /Users/[your account]/Library/ Group Containers/group.com.apple.Notes.

Open Notes, export the content you need to recover, quit the app, then reopen Time Machine, restore the backup of the folder that you made moments ago to recover the most up-to-date version of the app’s database, then add the exported content back to your note.