Why Export?

Last time, we discussed Apple Notes. While it’s an excellent tool, exporting data isn’t its strong suit. If you ever want to migrate, even ignoring all the handwritten doodles and photo attachments, simply transferring text to a plain text environment like Obsidian can be quite challenging.

Is Apple Notes the Best Note-Taking App for You?

I also mentioned the daunting task of exporting photos from the Apple ecosystem. With this in mind, I decided to thoroughly investigate efficient ways to export Apple Notes. Personally, I haven’t used Apple Notes intensively because I learned early on not to store notes in an opaque database—an important lesson from my experience with a cloud-based note-taking app.

For those who have been using the native Apple Notes on all their devices, it’s easy to imagine that over the years, perhaps even a decade, they’ve accumulated a vast number of notes. Thousands wouldn’t be surprising.

In my opinion, many old notes aren’t that important anymore; just leave them be. Nobody really needs to keep a temporary memo from ten years ago, right? However, sorting through them can be a nightmare. Sure, we could delete unimportant notes one by one, but manually checking and filtering all notes is definitely not productive. So, back to the original issue: we should find a way to export them in bulk as text files, then filter, organize, or archive them by date, size, or keyword. Personally, I recommend creating an Obsidian vault, tossing everything in there, and letting Obsidian index it—it’s perfect!

Some Failed Attempts

First, I thought about exporting via macOS. In the current macOS version, although we can select multiple Apple Notes, there’s no way to drag or export them to the desktop. The “Export” menu only offers PDF format, applicable to one note at a time.

Searching online, you’ll find people complaining that Apple seems to intentionally make it difficult to export notes to keep users locked into their ecosystem. So, does Apple offer a bulk export solution?

Some suggest finding the NoteStore.sqlite file, which looks like an SQLite database, seemingly housing your notes. However, it’s not that simple; this file appears to be encrypted. It’s suggested to use select * from ZICCLOUDSYNCINGOBJECT; to export data, but it doesn’t seem to work. If anyone has successfully opened it and retrieved complete data, feel free to let me know so I can update this post.

Yes, you might think of using AppleScript or Shortcuts to convert notes to text files and export them in bulk. The only method I’ve seen is exporting notes from a specific timeframe (like the past 7 days), then deleting and continuing. For users with years of notes, this isn’t efficient. If anyone has succeeded, please let me know for an update.

Maybe The Only Possible Solution

I realized that many places worldwide have data protection laws allowing users to download their historical data. For example, I’ve seen this option on some social media websites. So, Apple should provide this option, being a highly compliant company.

Finally, after logging into the Apple website with my Apple ID, I discovered that you can actually download all your Apple Notes.

• Log in to Apple Account (formerly Apple ID).
• Find the “Privacy” option.
• Go to Manage Your Data.
• Login again.
• Find “Request a copy of your data.”

• Select the content you want to export—besides Notes, you can also export synced emails, photos, contacts, etc.

• After confirming the export, you’ll see a file size limit prompt.
• Finally, you’ll be notified that Apple will take a few days to review, after which you can download your packaged data.

Then, it’s just a matter of waiting and hoping.

Final Thoughts

Apple Notes is excellent for quick jotting (plus the latest iOS voice transcription features are great!).

But simply put, don’t use it as a permanent dumping ground for important notes—it’s not a PKM. We should develop the habit of regularly extracting important information from Apple Notes and archiving it locally. Treat it as an inbox, aiming for regular Inbox Zero.

Additionally, I’ve been trying out Simplenote lately, which seems to be another good “cross-platform” lightweight note-taking tool. I’ll introduce it next time if I get the chance.