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(Mac) Recovering lost notes from the "clipper"/quick-note toolbar


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Apologies if this was already discussed somewhere, but I can't seem to find it anywhere so here goes:

 

 

Just recently, my laptop's hard drive crashed, and I attempted to save my system files by copying over my Library to an external drive.

Attempting to restore my "current" Evernote onto my new drive (by pasting the old Library) worked out fine, however the long list of notes I had stored in the "quick-note"/clipper (on the toolbar) seems to have disappeared, and I don't know where I can recover it — actually, is there a way to recover what was written in the quick-note/clipper? Was there a backup made somewhere? I've located a file named "quick-note-preserved.obj", but I can't seem to open it with anything. Do I have to import it somewhere?

 

If it helps, I'm a macbook pro user, and the application was downloaded from the "app store" on this laptop.

 

Thanks for your help TT.TT Just any way to view the information will do....

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  • 1 year later...

How did you go baka? I have the same problem after realising my quick-notes have not been saving to evernote for the last few months! I can see there are many .obj files on my local hard drive, but does anyone have any info about how to restore or view them? Thanks

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  • 2 months later...

Yes @evernomeansno, I submitted my issue to technical support, and I heard back (it took a few days).

The support offered to convert it for me if I sent them my .obj file, but I opted to do it alone, so contact them if you prefer they do it.

Here is the summary of the steps to take, but bare in mind:

1) You need access to command line, on Mac, you could use Terminal for example. 

2) You need to have Xcode installed, which you can get from the App store (free, I believe).

3) For the below path, check that your Group Containers path, and your obj file path follows this pattern, or a pattern that makes sense to you, or that you can locate on your machine

4) As I recall,  I left the file in tact as .obj format before starting the below steps

After that ... here's a copy of their instructions:

Here are the steps that I take to try to rescue this info from the obj file. Just to set the right expectation, it works about 60% of the time.

  1. Open the obj from ~/Library/Group Containers/Q25WDW7YH9.com.evernote.Evernote/Evernote/quick-note/55091285-personal-www.evernote.comfile/current-quicknote in any text editor. You’ll see a bunch of garbled text.
  2. Convert it to a XML Plist:
  3. Copy file to another place.
    1. open terminal and cd into that directory
    2. paste plutil -convert xml1 quick-note-preserved.obj
    3. open in any editor & search for text
  4. Copy the text and paste it into Evernote.

You may need to do a little cleaning of the text, but it should be all there

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  • 5 months later...

Found another way to recover a lost quick note: Today, on the quick-notes toolbar widget, as soon as I hit "Save to Evernote," everything I wrote disappeared and couldn't be found in the app or on the web. (TBH I didn't even want to use the dumb toolbar feature; I hit command control N b/c I wanted to do a regular note in Preview but thought, Huh, I like Evernote, maybe this'll be fun 🙃 )  Thanks to this thread I searched for quick-note-preserved.obj. Like it was mentioned earlier, renaming to .txt doesn't work. 

But what DOES WORK is right-click and selecting to open it with Notes. You'll have to wade through a bit of code at the beginning and the end, but your lost note will be waiting for you in the middle of it. It weirdly won't let you properly copy and paste it (::laugh, sob::) so you'll have to AirDrop that note to your phone if you have an iPhone. 

What a trash glitch though. Can they fix this already??

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  • 1 year later...

Thanks for this. Instead of sending by AirDrop to an iOS device (which still ended up with it locked in Notes and wouldn't let me copy the text), I printed the note from Mac Notes to PDF, then opened, copied all, and pasted to Evernote (then delete the code at the beginning and end). Worked great!

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