How to Recover Missing Notes after macOS Sierra or El Capitan Upgrade

After you upgrade your Mac or MacBook from Yosemite to El Capitan or El Capitan to the macOS Sierra, I guess you might find something lost. Because you are not the only person who encounters such a problem. Many Mac users claimed that they found their notes missing or disappeared and wondered how to recover notes on Mac.

From Mr Alfisti who asked this question in Apple Support Communities:

After upgrading my MacBook Pro to El Capitan this morning (and notes to new notes on all my devices), I've lost some important notes I had saved across my devices. These were simple text notes that mainly were created on my iPad. I can't find the missing notes anywhere anymore, and have no idea how or if I can recover them?

From a reader whose notes have been deleted:

My notes have been deleted after updating my MacBook Pro from El Capitan to macOS Sierra. Is there any way to restore deleted notes on Mac or how can I recover them? Thanks a lot.

If you unfortunately have lost important notes after you upgrade your Mac to El Capitan, you come to the right place. In this article, we will show you several ways, such as with best data recovery software to recover deleted or missing notes after El Capitan or macOS Sierra upgrade. Hope these ways would be helpful for you.

Recover Deleted Notes on Mac from Storage

When you delete some notes, you may still find the deleted text within the files Notes uses to store its data on your Mac. Because all notes are combined into a single database-like file and this file may retain the text of recently deleted items, so you can get your deleted notes back from the storage file.

To recover deleted notes on Mac from storage, at first, you need to find Notes’ storage location at ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes/. Enter the path string in the Finder’s window. And you will see the Notes folder, inside this folder, you should see a small assortment of similarly named files with names such as NotesV2.storedata.

Copy these files to a separation location, and add an .html extension to them. Then, open one of the files in a web browser, and you will see your current and the deleted or missing notes. At last, copy and save deleted notes to a separate location. If this way is not work, you can try below ways.

Retrieve Mac Notes Disappeared with Time Machine

Time Machine is a backup software application distributed with the Apple OS X computer operating system which backs up all of your files to an external hard drive so that you can restore them later or see how they looked in the past. If you always backup your Mac data with Time Machine regularly, you can recover notes disappeared from mac with it.

To do so, choose Enter Time Machine from the Time Machine menu, or click Time Machine in the Dock. And use the timeline on the edge of the screen to locate a version of the Notes storage folder that just precedes your deletion. Click Restore to restore the selected file, or Control-click the file for other options. When you next launch the Notes app, your missing notes should reappear.

Recover Mac Disappeared or Deleted Notes with Data Recovery Software

If the above two ways are not work for you, here is the last approach. If you don’t backup your Mac with Time Machine very often, that means you may not backup your Mac notes regularly. And it also means you have to recover disappeared or deleted notes on Mac with a third-party Mac data recovery software like Cisdem Data Recovery.

Cisdem Data Recovery for Mac is the best Mac data recovery software that can recover lost or corrupted photos, audios, videos, documents and archive from any Mac supported data storage media, including internal/external hard drives, USB drives, SD card, digital cameras, iPods etc. It also supports many kinds of common file types and raw file types, including pef, nef, dcr, sr2, etc. And you can download the free trial version and follow below guidance to recover your missing notes.

Just click above download button and install Cisdem Data Recovery on Mac. Then launch this app. And Cisdem Data Recovery will show two scanning modes for you, including Quick Scan and Deep Scan. You can choose the suitable option according to your need.
After you choose the scan mode, this app will allows to choose which disk to scan. Here you should choose the disk where you have stored your notes. Otherwise, no app can help you find the recoverable files of notes. And if needed, click the gear icon to use file filters feature to find the target files in a short time. Then click Scan to look for recoverable files.
This app will start to scan your target disk and this process will take some time which depends on the size and quantity of files on disk. After this app finishes scanning, you can preview and choose your target files to recover only. Then click “Recover” to recover your missing notes file.

Other useful tips on recovering notes on Mac:

1. If you always backup your Mac notes to iCloud, you should disable internet access immediately when you find your notes missing. And if fortunately you could view the missing notes on other apple devices.

2. This article talks about how to recover Mac missing notes, but if you want to know more about recover iPhone notes, you can visit the article: How to Recover Deleted Notes from iPhone.

3. You can also export your notes as PDF to make a copy of them. To do this, go to File and choose “Export as PDF”.

4. Always backup your Mac with Time Machine or other ways to avoid any data loss.