I use Apple Notes for a lot of important information, so I wanted to make sure I had backups.

Even though iCloud syncing is a thing, it isn't the same as a backup. It keeps your notes the same across all of your devices, but if you accidentally delete or change something, that change will sync too.

Apple does have some recovery options (like Recently Deleted), but there isn't a built-in way to automatically save snapshots of your Notes database over time.

If you already use Time Machine, it backs up your Mac, including Apple Notes.

Pros

• Built into macOS
• Good if you ever need to restore your Mac

Cons

• Requires a backup drive
• Restoring just your Notes isn't always simple

You can export individual notes as PDFs if there are only a few you want to safeguard.

Pros

• No extra software

Cons

• Easy to forget
• Doesn't work well if you have lots of notes

I wanted something that would quietly make a backup every so often, so I wrote a small open-source tool called Notehold.

It:

• Makes a ZIP backup of your local Apple Notes database
• Checks once a day and after login
• Creates a new backup every 10 days if needed
• Verifies the backup after creating it
• Lets you store backups on another drive or in a cloud-synced folder
• Cleans up old backups while keeping older restore points

The project is here:

Notehold on GitHub

I mostly wrote it for myself, but I figured other people might find it useful too.