Apple Notes database parser

About

Apple Notes data is stored in a SQLite database. Some month ago the data has been stored in the file /Users/<user>/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes/NotesV7.storedata respectively NotesV6.storedata for the prior version. The notes have been stored in a HTML subset in clear text.

Then Apple kept the file but didn't update it anymore. Instead, a new location was used: /Users/christian/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes/NoteStore.sqlite. The data is not in clear text anymore. I needed the access badly, because my MacBook Pro was defect (spilled a bottle of wine over it), my last backup was long ago and I didn't sync into iCloud.

So I found apple_cloud_notes_parser, a Perl script which showed me how to parse the data. However, they have a small bug in calculating the length of the data, so you will get only the first 27 chars or so of the note.

I decided to port the code to Java (ok, to Groovy) to be able to fix that. I could have adopted the perl script but I thought I will have to strip the HTML fragments, but this was wrong. In the new format, there are no HTML fragments any more. Anyway, even if I used it only once, the script evolved based on feedback.

Usage

Copy the database (location above) to the input folder, rename it to NoteStore.sqlite and start the script with ./gradlew runScript. You will receive a file per document in the output folder. Afterwards I created empty notes and copy/pasted the notes back to Apple Notes again (at this time with activated iCloud sync).

Remark

I also tried to copy the whole database to my new MacBook, but this didn't work.

Tested with

openjdk version "21.0.1" 2023-10-17
OpenJDK Runtime Environment Homebrew (build 21.0.1)
Groovy Version: 4.0.19

Acknowledgement

• Duncan Brown provided a PR to obtain name, structure and creation timestamp for all notes

Links

• Found another statement, didn't test it: https://github.com/ydkhatri/mac_apt/issues/46#issuecomment-766418508