After discovering that I couldn’t restore notes from iCloud to my new iPad I set about discovering if there was a way I could recover the notes I had backed up through iTunes. It turns out that there is indeed a fairly straight forward process.
Why am I in this predicament?
When I first booted the iPad I did not restore from my previous version and I initially turned iCoud off. This meant that I had a virgin iPad that I then proceeded to load with apps. Some time later I realised that I had no previous notes! There doesn’t seem to be a way to restore notes from a backup that was made on another iOS device, so that means you need to be a little bit creative in your approach to getting to the data.
If like me you have had several iOS devices the chances are you have loads of data backed up on your computer from those devices, but there is no easy way to read this data. You therefore need to install a couple of apps that make this process easy.
Step 1: Download and install iPhone Backup Extractor and MesaSQLite.
Step 2: Launch iPhone Backup Extractor and click on the “Read Backups” button and proceed to choose which backup you wish to recover. At this point you you need to select the “Extract” button which will ask you to select a target folder to place the extracted files into.
Click on read backups and choose which backup you wish to recover
Select iOS files and extract
Specify where you want the extracted files to go
Step 3: You now need to launch MesaSQLite which you will use to read the data in your iOS backup. If it doesn’t automatically ask “which database would you like to open?” go to File > Open Database and navigate to the folder you extracted your iOS backup to. As we are going to recover notes, you need to navigate to iOS Files > Library > Notes > and choose notes.sqlite
Step 4: Near the top left, where it says “Table Name”, select “ZNOTEBODY” and below that select “ZCONTENT”. Next select “contains” and finally hit “search”. This will return any notes that have been backed up to your Mac. From here, simply double click on the text and copy and paste into a text editor and save your note.
If you know of an easier way to do this please do share your knowledge in the comments below.
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Thanks, that solved part of the problem. But how do I recover notes that are neither in backup, nor in iPad? Is there a way to do that?
I’m not sure. Do you mean they are in iCloud? If they are not in the backup and not on the iPad they be lost forever.
Having lost some valuable notes thru quirks of the iCloud, I disabled cloud sync, only to find out that the old method of sync’ing thru desktop / iTunes is no longer supported!
I used the combination of [iPhone Backup Extractor] + [Liya], and my problem was easily and quickly solved.
Your blog saved my life, Chris; many thanks…
Is it possible to use this software to extract photos as well?
@Jamie I don’t think it works for photos.
With iPhone Backup Extractor the photos are saved on a folder as DCIM
, no need to extract.