Lost notes
October 11, 2016 1:27 PM   Subscribe

I lost a lot of documents from the Notes app on my mid-2012 Macbook Air. Is there ANY way they are recoverable?

This is what happened:
1. Writing in Notes, it froze. Reset computer and found an error message preventing me from opening it.
2. Went to the Apple store, they managed to get Notes open but it was blank, then accidentally synced it to the Notes on my phone (not the same), so those are there, but not the desktop ones
3. Took it to another store, who told me to try a data recovery service
4. Data recovery service does data recovery stuff, says there was no trace of them, it's like they never existed.

These were not backed up or in Time Machine. Everything else on my computer is fine and nothing was lost/deleted, except the contents of desktop Notes.

I know it is crazy to ask, but is there ANY way they could still be found, even in part? Is it worth getting a second opinion? Where did they even go, since I never actually deleted them? There was a lot of valuable information there and I want to know I did everything I can. (Please do not tell me "You should have backed it up." I am aware.)
posted by colorblock sock to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Do you have them synced to iCloud and therefore to your phone? If so, any time you connected your phone to your computer by USB the phone would have been backed up to your computer and they should be in there. You could back up your phone, restore from an old image, and find them that way.

Otherwise, no there's probably no way, sorry
posted by tillsbury at 1:59 PM on October 11, 2016


Do you have them synced to iCloud and therefore to your phone? If so, any time you connected your phone to your computer by USB the phone would have been backed up to your computer and they should be in there.

You're conflating two kinds of syncing, iCloud and iTunes. If one is set up the other doesn't function. Also OP describes syncing it with phone notes so my guess is they have it set to iCloud.


colorblock, Were you using Notes or Stickies? Stickies would be the "desktop notes" you describe and are separate from the Notes app, which would explain why they were missing when you look in Notes. I'm not aware of any backups for Stickies but if you were accidentally looking in Notes that might explain not being able to find them in any backups.

Otherwise in my experience, dozens of notes or contacts suddenly disappearing is because they were synced to an IMAP account that isn't connected anymore. Check in Sys Prefs>Internet Accounts, any email addresses missing that you're used to seeing?

Edit: Also there's no reason Notes backed up in Time Machine would all disappear suddenly when the app crashed, so that evidence seems to lend credence to my broken-IMAP-syncing theory as synced content typically isn't backed up, since it's coming from an outside source. No reason to back it up.
posted by sixfootaxolotl at 2:25 PM on October 11, 2016


I've had Notes disappear and recovered them by keyword search; they were skulking in some obscure system folder.

I don't sync Notes between devices though, so no idea if this maps to your case or if it will help you.
posted by tel3path at 2:41 PM on October 11, 2016


Response by poster: Brief threadsit:
It was Notes, not Stickies. They're not backed up in Time Machine. Only the phone Notes, which are different from the ones on my desktop that I was looking for, were synced to iCloud.
posted by colorblock sock at 3:02 PM on October 11, 2016


While it's possible the data recovery people were incompetent & missed traces of your files left behind on your SSD, it's likely they were right because of a feature of SSDs that's enabled by default on MacBook Air called TRIM that helps clean up SSDs as blocks get freed to keep the system from getting bogged down. Basically what happens is, as a block on the SSD is declared empty, TRIM writes 0s into all the spots inside it. It's a thing that's necessary on SSDs that isn't on hard drives. The WikiPedia page on TRIM goes into a lot more detail & is a good place to start in understanding TRIM; there are some exceptions that may apply in your case but the likelihood of that is IMO pretty small. Sorry.
posted by scalefree at 3:03 PM on October 11, 2016


« Older Digital examples of utilitarian journals and logs   |   Rhymes with Silver and Orange Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.