Back up Apple Notes

The ways to back up Apple Notes

	What you get	What it misses
iCloud	your notes on every device	a deletion or a bad edit syncs everywhere; there is no copy outside Notes
Time Machine	the Notes database as it was on a day	you restore the whole database, never one note, and it is made for Notes, not for reading
File › Export as PDF	one note you can read anywhere	one note at a time, by hand, with no folders
Exporter	every note as a Markdown file, with its folders, attachments and links, kept current	locked notes

Steps

1. Connect Apple Notes, choose an export folder like ~/Documents/notes and press “Sync Now”. This folder is the live mirror.
2. Turn on Settings > “Open at Login”, so the mirror keeps up after a restart.
3. For snapshots, install the command line: on the Command Line card press “Copy Install Command” and paste it once in Terminal.
4. On the same card, press “add folder…” under “Export Destinations” and pick a backup folder, like ~/Backups. A grant covers every folder below it.
5. Add a nightly snapshot with crontab -e. exporter help cron prints the line with the full path of the command on your Mac; use that, and write % as \%:

0 3 * * * exporter export --dest ~/Backups/notes-$(date +\%F)

What you get

~/Documents/notes/            the mirror, always current
~/Backups/notes-2026-09-10/   a snapshot
~/Backups/notes-2026-09-11/   the next night's

Each snapshot is a full export, one .md per note laid out as “Organize” on the card says, with its attachments and a record of the run in its own .exporter/. export runs fine while the app is open.

Pitfalls

• The mirror is not an archive: a note you delete in Apple Notes is removed from it on the next sync. The dated snapshots keep it.
• Exporter cannot restore. It never writes into Apple Notes, so getting a note back means opening its file and copying the text into a new note.
• Locked notes are never exported, and on the free allowance a backup holds your first 100 notes. exporter status shows how many free notes are used.

Every flag of export is in the command line reference, and the files themselves in the Apple Notes docs.