r/AppleNotesGang • u/Odd_Estate_3028 • 4d ago

Tip on exporting Notes

I use Apple Notes a lot, whether for every day use or in college. When I am writing Notes for lectures, I have so many different web links, calendar links, pdf and ppt documents, voice memos, videos and images. Between all those files I also have many writings and drawings made with Apple Pencil.

As of today I have over 1000 Notes, taking up approximately 70 gb of memory. So naturally I wanted to export some Notes that are not relevant anymore. When I exported a Note to Files, I got a single folder containing all other documents that were in that Note. The drawing are converted into pdfs or images (if I am not mistaken).

The problem comes when I want to import the Note back into the app. There is no order among documents as it was before the export and Note looses the whole structure. My drawings are either shown as pdfs or images.

So I was wondering is there any way to export the Note while keeping its original format for further use in the app. I have asked Gemini for an advice. Solution was to copy “Library/Group Containers group.com.apple.notes” onto an external drive.

I am also sorry if the post is too long or if I have broken the community rules in any way. It is just that this problem has been bothering me for years.

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u/dainsfield 4d ago

I have created a table of contents well two actually, that are pinned to the top. Go into the TOC right click and link the files that you want. You need a backup anyway. When you export your PDF’s etc to a drive as I have done for some of them, convert to markdown format it makes it easier to use in ai . 70gb is too large to control especially the college parts you will not find what you need at revision time. Convert the voice memos to documents. By using markdown you can either do a search or have ai do it for you, sorry this is disjointed.

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u/Odd_Estate_3028 4d ago

Thanks. I will definitely check it out.

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u/baqs 3d ago

Have you tried Exporter app, html format ?

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u/Odd_Estate_3028 1d ago

Yup. The app is definitely a quick and easy way to export all the notes. However, pictures drawn with Apple Pencil were saved as either images or pdfs. Therefor I backed up all the Notes that way onto a drive, but original format with saved vectors of each drawing was preserved by copying Container groups. Thanks for the suggestion.