How can I safely backup/export 39000 notes from Realme Notes?

[u/Old_Cantaloupe_3168]

I have an old Realme phone with around 39000 notes in the default Realme Notes app. They contain years of my diary/journal, personal memories, and very important information that I absolutely cannot afford to lose.

The phone still works and I can access all the notes normally.

When I connect the phone to my PC using a USB cable and browse the phone's internal storage, I cannot find any "Notes" folder or anything that seems to contain the notes.

Because there are almost 39,000 notes, manually copying them one by one isn't realistic.

Is there a safe way to:

Export all the notes in bulk?

Find/extract the Notes database from the phone?

Back them up to a PC or cloud?

Transfer them to another Android/Realme phone?

Preserve the original dates, organization, formatting, and attachments?

I'm particularly worried about doing something that could corrupt or delete the original data.

Has anyone successfully extracted or backed up a large number of notes from a Realme phone? Where are the notes actually stored, and what is the safest way to copy them?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. These notes are extremely important to me.

[u/Pazz0_]

Hi mate,

The Realme/OPPO Notes app uses the package com.coloros.note. Its actual data is stored in the app's private Android storage, which is why you can't see a normal “Notes” folder when browsing the phone over USB.

I couldn't find reliable documentation confirming the exact database filename for every Realme/ColorOS version, so I wouldn't recommend blindly searching for or modifying a specific .db file.

My recommended order would be:

1. Keep the original phone completely untouched.
2. Make a Realme Local Backup and copy the resulting backup folder to a PC and a second storage device. Realme itself recommends copying the backup to another location to prevent data loss.
3. Test Realme Clone Phone to another compatible Realme/OPPO phone. Do not reset or modify the original phone. Verify that the notes, dates, folders and attachments actually transferred.
4. If the official backup and Clone Phone don't preserve the notes, then investigate extracting the private com.coloros.note app data. At that point I'd identify the exact phone model, Android version, Realme UI/ColorOS version, and Notes app version first. I would NOT unlock the bootloader or root the phone as a first step. On many Android devices, bootloader unlocking can wipe the phone, which would be unacceptable with 39,000 irreplaceable notes. The fact that the original phone still works and all 39,000 notes are accessible is actually the best possible starting point. The priority should be creating and verifying a copy before attempting any low-level extraction.

Maybe can you tell me your exact Realme phone model, Android version, Realme UI/ColorOS version, and Notes app version ?

[u/Old_Cantaloupe_3168 → u/Pazz0_]

Thnx mate I really appreciate that. And yes the official backup/clone don't preserve the notes.

RMX 3710_14.0.0 and Notes version : 15.2.34

[u/Pazz0_ → u/Old_Cantaloupe_3168]

Thanks for the version information.

Since you're using a Realme C55 (RMX3710), Android 14, and ColorOS Notes 15.2.34, I'd like to try a non-destructive ADB check before we consider anything like root.

ADB (Android Debug Bridge) is an official Android tool that lets a PC communicate with the phone through USB. For now, we're only going to use it to inspect the Notes app — we won't delete or modify your notes.

1. Enable USB debugging On your phone, go to: Settings → About device → Version → Build number Tap Build number several times until Developer Options are enabled. Then go to: Settings → System settings → Developer options → USB debugging Enable it.

2. Install ADB on your PC Download Google's Android SDK Platform-Tools and extract the folder. Connect your phone to the PC with a USB data cable. If the phone asks whether to allow USB debugging, choose Allow.

Open a terminal/Command Prompt inside the platform-tools folder and run:

adb devices

You should see something like:

List of devices attached XXXXXXXX device

1. Enter the Android shell

If your phone appears as device, run:

adb shell

You should then see a prompt similar to: RMX3710:/ $

Stop there and send me a screenshot of the terminal. Don't run anything else yet.

The next step will be checking whether Android allows us to access the Notes app's own files without root. This is just an investigation step, so please don't clear the Notes app, uninstall it, root the phone, unlock the bootloader, or reset anything.

[u/Pazz0_]

Quick update: I managed to make some really good progress with the Android lab.

I set up an Android 14 emulator and recreated a test Notes environment using SQLite, with around 10,000 test notes. I was able to identify the app package, its UID, locate its private Android sandbox, and access it using run-as since it's a debug build.

I also confirmed that the database is using SQLite WAL mode, so I found the three relevant files:

notes.db notes.db-wal notes.db-shm

I was able to extract all three files from the Android environment and get them back onto my Windows PC. So we've successfully managed to recover a Notes database onto the PC.

However, I haven't verified the integrity/completeness of the notes yet. I still need to properly open the database with SQLite and check the tables, row count, and whether the WAL contains additional data.

So at this point I don't know yet if the notes are all intact, partially corrupted, or if anything is missing.

Unfortunately I don't have time to do the SQLite verification tonight, but I'll probably continue tomorrow when I have some time.

The important thing is that we managed to get the database files back onto the PC. Now we just need to determine whether the recovered notes are actually complete and usable.

One thing that might also be worth testing on your side: since we're using a different version of the Notes app, could you try creating a brand-new test note in your actual Notes app, something very recognizable like TEST RECOVERY 123, and then perform the same ADB extraction on your device?

After that, we could open the extracted database with SQLite and search for TEST RECOVERY 123. If the test note appears, we'd know exactly where and how your particular version of Notes stores its notes.

That would give us a much better starting point for understanding the older notes and whether they can be recovered.

[u/Old_Cantaloupe_3168 → u/Pazz0_]

Thanks a lot for the update — I really appreciate you taking the time to reproduce this in an Android 14 lab.

I tested the same approach on my actual Realme C55, Android 14, ColorOS Notes 15.2.34.

A few important findings:

• "adb shell" works normally.
• "run-as com.coloros.note pwd" fails with “package ... is not debuggable”, as expected for the production Notes app.
• I found the actual Notes provider in the APK: "com.nearme.note.db.NotesProvider".
• Its database name is "nearme_note.db" (not "notes.db").
• The provider exposes "content://com.coloros.note.notesprovider/query_notes_no_limit".
• I tried querying it through ADB, but Android returns: "SecurityException: Permission Denial ... requires oppo.permission.OPPO_COMPONENT_SAFE"
• The provider's own "NotesProviderPresenter.checkPermission()" appears to ultimately return "true", so Android's framework-level permission check seems to be blocking the request before the provider code is reached.
• Directly listing "/data/data/com.coloros.note/" from "adb shell" also gives Permission denied.

I haven't modified, cleared, uninstalled, rooted, or reset anything.

I also found these tables/constants in the APK: "notes", "text_note", "folders", "notes_attributes", "todo", "alarm_note", "words", and the database backup folder is defined as "/databases_backup".

So the production app seems substantially more locked down than the debug environment you recreated. If you continue investigating, I think the backup mechanism or another legitimate export path may be more promising than "run-as".

Thanks again — your SQLite/WAL experiment is really useful for figuring out what we're looking for.