guildfor01: Backup Mail Notes

Wednesday 27 April 2011

Backup Mail Notes

This hint offers a low tech solution to an all too common problem. The forums are filled with exasperated people who have lost months of notes they created in Mail after a crash, update or simple mistake.

Perhaps Apple is assuming we all have a Time Machine drive hooked up. Whatever the reason, they have not seen fit to provide a straightforward way to backup Mail.app Notes.

There are two easy solutions, and while they will not update or sync in any way, at least you can recover your notes if you inadvertently lose them all.

If you have just a few notes, the first and simplest is method to make a text clipping.

Select all of the text in your note.
Click and drag the selected text onto the desktop or your backup folder.

That's it! Your note appears in the folder as a text clipping. It opens in the Finder and can be dragged back into a Note just as easily.

The second involves digging around in the Finder to find w ...