Gary, you’re a lifesaver! I am definitely going to set up that shortcut to save my notes. Whenever a person tells me they’re getting a Mac, I point them to your channel. Thank you. 🙏🏻
There are good suggestions here for backing up Notes given its inherent limitations. The main reason I do not use Notes is that, unlike other software products that integrate with iCloud (including both those made by Apple and those made by some third parties), it lacks both version control (a sort of backup for iterations of a Note over time) and an individual file structure that would allow going back to an old version of a note through a Time Machine backup. I am surprised that Apple hasn't implemented version control for a product as widely used as Notes when it has it for other products that store files in iCloud (Keynote, Numbers, Pages, TextEdit, even pdf files in Preview). I don't trust myself to not inadvertently mess up a Note and have no way to get it back if an immediate undo action is no longer available.
I agree. I try not to store anything very important in Notes. It is just for "notes" -- meaning more casual or temporary information. But I know a lot of people are now using Notes for all sorts of things so I hope Apple improves it with backup and version control soon.
Gary - great idea - I created the shortcut and tried to run it (with Notes open). I receive a message each time which states “This action is trying to share 125 Notes items which is not allowed. You can allow this in preferences.” I’ve looked at Notes settings but don’t see any settings that appear applicable.
Very helpful I've been trying to figure this out for a while , I just want to backup my entire notes folder as either a .pdf or a word document . ie Export all notes as word, or pdf. Of course I could just copy and paste all 187 of my notes . I'm not familiar with "shortcuts" it reminds me of using SAS in my working life (I'm in my late 60's) when one comma out of place spelt disaster !
I also back up my attachments (pics and videos) using the Attachment Viewer (cmd+3) then select all and right click to save to an external destination.
Very nice. I am new to apple pencil and trying to take notes by hand. Not knowing apps well I like the idea to (at will) decide to save the note as a text or scribble type of thing. I would like to write maybe a couple of sentences, fix and correct it and then convert it to text. I see some who write but it puts down letters of the word in a font of something... I learned a lot here. .. didn't know how it works... so I really want an app that I can learn and feel comfortable with using.
I deleted a line in Notes, Apple support told me they wouldn’t be able to retrieve it, I had Time Machine on, but as you know it can’t back up, but I will have to watch your video a couple of more times. Too bad Apple doesn’t have a solution. . Especially when it is notes that you can’t loose.
Hello Sir i have learnt many things from your channel i have a query regarding the PowerPoint and Keynote if I want to create a presentation regarding maps then how to make different portion of that map highlighted please help me to solve that issue and make my presentations better for my new channel and you are doing very well sir but by seeing your subscriptions I totally get the motivated. I hope you will get lots of subscribers in few months. Have a nice day. Life is all about pleasure I am from India and love from India. Thanks.🎉
Gary sir this is not my issue my issue is about svg files when we use maps to edit then the text on maps get wash out and a popup menu comes which shows not supported or some lines get of when we break a part i hope now you can understand my query Thanks to reply love from 🇮🇳 india
@@macmost sir when we use some svg files on keynote and try to break them a part for (eg when we edit downloaded maps )on keynote then we apply break them a part names of the city get disappeared how to solve this #help😅
@@Kartikrana786 It would depend on how the SVG files are put together. You'll need to work with them to see. You may be better off taking them into a vector editing app and working with them there.
Gary-really appreciate your comments for all the help. I couldn't get this to work -received comment-“Couldn’t communicate with helper application”. Any ideas?
Hello, I like your videos, especially with Automator. I have a video request, i would like to see you make a clickable automation shortcut that opens up 3 Safari/chrome on one screen next to each other, i use a program called Magnet to space windows across the screen, but it would be awesome if you could save a certain "desktop" configuration with mac? so on desktop 1, I have 3 x Safari/chrome next to each other, and on desktop 2 I have half the screen Spotify and the other half RU-vid. Would really like to have an icon or command that opens up these two desktop setups, is this possible? /Dennis
Shortcut terminates at very first step with error “Couldn’t communicate with helper application” Anyone else getting this error? Gary - any help would be appreciated. Thx
When I run this shortcut, I get a message that says,"This action is trying to share 1064 Notes items, which in not allowed. you can allow this in Preferences" Which app and where should I allow this?
I just bought one 10Tb external hdd for Time Machine, one 2Tb mini external drive for my programming studies, and one 2Tb for my story writing endeavour.
Thanks for this, I've been "backing up" some of my long, ongoing project Notes to Pages by opening in Pages, then saving … instead of overwriting, Pages will increment a number, so I get versioning. But this can be tiresome to remember to do. Your Shortcut to make a PDF of the text of notes is great. I used _Modified Date_ instead of _Created Date_ so that the Shortcut can save multiple versions (handy for something with "high churn").
Addendum: I added to your shortcut a bit. 1. Because I can run some of my shortcuts on multiple devices, I use an IF…THEN statement to “Get Device details,” “check “if Device model is Mac,” with a “Stop shortcut” in the ELSE so that the shortcut will just exit on any other device. 2. You’re right that this shortcut sort of stalls if Notes isn’t open. Easy enough, within the IF…THEN I just put actions to Open App (Notes), then Hide App (Notes), Wait a second, then continue with your backup steps. Works a treat.
I wasn't able to get it to work. It doesn't give me the choice of "formatted date". After the 5th try, I gave up. I love al your videos have learned a lot; I'm just challenged with shortcuts. Thanks you for all you do.
When I try to run this on my iPhone, I keep getting an error that says, "time ran out on trying to find Notes, exceeded time". What can I do to remedy this error? I opened notes up on the iPhone as well
I built this for Mac, so you may need to alter it some to get it to work on the iPhone, or it may not be possible. Or it could be you are putting your notes somewhere else besides iCloud, like in Google or something. Lots of things to consider.
Yet another great tutorial. Thanks, Gary! Talking about Shortcuts: can we please have an up-to-date tutorial on it. Part of me thinks that life is too short to learn Shortcuts, especially using RU-vid tutorials that are years out of date. So, maybe a new one would give me (and hopefully others) the push I need to finally get to grips with it.
I use Notes as my main note taking app. At this time I have a couple of hundred in there. Set up the Shortcut yesterday. It took a while to get it to work correctly as I don’t often use Shortcuts. But, once I got it working it works perfectly. Thanks for this. Really what I need to do is go thru them and combine ones that are essentially the same and delete ones that I’ll never need.
What a great video Gary. I love videos that give users a step by step method for doing essential things with our tech and data. So useful - many thanks
Thanks for this video and this hack, it seems to be really helpful. I followed your instructions but for some reason it only downloads 26 notes, but I have 324 notes. Why doesn't it register the others? Do you know how I could fix that?
@@macmost I don't know what was the problem. In the end, I tried a couple different things. I deleted the 26 notes that were actually working from my notes app, and then it did 30 more. I tried it again, and it did another 26. However, the last time I tried it wouldn't do anymore. I gave up and just spent an hour last night saving each of the remaining notes individually. I think maybe it is on a different system as you suggested, but I am not sure how or why or where. The good news is I can backup any new notes with the shortcut you demonstrated. :)
As always, you talk too fast, and move around the screen too fast. For me. The steps you take are too fast to follow, and I have to endlessly repeat what you’ve done, and listen carefully to what you say, several times before I can hopefully replicate your actions. I know, I know, sounds like a personal problem of mine.
Thanks for these excellent tutorials. Will the ‘save to pdf’ work if you use locked notes and if so will your pdf files in the save notes folder be secure?
If you unlock the Notes first, it should save them. No, the PDF won't be locked. But it will still be a file in your user account and your user account IS locked, right?
Great yes, thanks I have got it working - also can see that one can lock a pdf back up in the back up folder as an additional security if you needed to, after it has been backed up and created in the back up folder. Many thanks!
Hey there Gary! Great tutorial - But can you help? - I followed your shortcut to backup notes but kept hitting this error: "The operation couldn't be completed. (Appintents.AppDependencyManager.Error__C.CUnifledNoteContext> error O.)" Any clues? *checked the shortcut script for accuracy - followed your directions to a T. thanks mate.
That's a bizarre error message. You shouldn't be getting something like that with a shortcut. Try a restart. Try only exporting one note instead of all (use the limit or filters in the action)
Hi Gary, GREAT SHORTCUT ... however, after building the shortcut as described, I keep receiving OSStatus error 1712 (the action "Find Notes" was interupted because it didn't finish executing in time). Any idea what could be causing this error? Thanks so much for your help (and your fantastic videos).
I had an issue with the last command to run the shortcut, I'm using OS Sonoma 14.4.1 on an M3 iMac and could not put in line what was showing on your Mac as you completed the shortcut. I.E Formatted date is not one of the dropdown labels available in the subpath statement, any ideas ?
Gary- Thanks for all that you do. This shortcut looks great. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to run. I received the following error: "Couldn’t communicate with a helper application". Some of the web comments seem to indicate that some characters in Notes cause this problem.:
If that is the case, try using the Add Filter button or Limit option to see if you can get it working with just one note. Then expand from there to maybe guess which note could be causing the problem.
Gary, Useful shortcut, thanks. I have amended to add Repeated Item ▸ Folder to the subpath, which keeps notes in their respective folders. But it doesn’t handle more than one level of folders. Any suggestions?
Awesome Gary !! Was looking for this for a long time. Question - Would it be possible to create a script or a shortcut that would create a pdf for every note, like what we can manually with export pdf ?
What happens if you were to restore a time machine backup to your Mac but your iPhone has a newer version of the Notes database? isn’t it? gonna want overwrite the notes on the Mac with the latest version currently on your iPhone?
Thanks, Gary. I tried this but some of the notes come out truncated - it is using an older version of the note, or something. The modified date shows an old version, and some data is missing for some.
@@timmark4190 You can share notes with others. Use the sharing feature to do that. Though I'm suspecting that maybe you aren't talking about the Notes app here?
ps - I'm doing something wrong - my TimeMachine backup is from February - I can retrieve the data base fine, but when I turn on WIFI, the files sync to ICloud and the "newer" notes files overwrite the February backups... I solved this by opening up the notes so that the backups were the "newer" files... so I am able to retreive those February notes... HOWEVER, I have 3 very important notes that are LOCKED... I can't open them, or transfer them to another account until they are unlocked... for some reason, my Mac system gets weird, and won't let me unlock them... Does this problem sound familiar to you?
I have a compulsion (among many) about easily date-sorting stuff. Dates such as 2024-01-02 always confuse me as to ‘which is month, which is day’, since i work with US and International users/data. Dates such as 2024-Jan-02 do not date sort correctly… April first in line 🧐 I use the following 2024-01jan-02 2024-02feb-03 Etc. Automatically gives a proper dated sort, and my eye can quickly see month. Haven’t checked whether ‘shortcuts’ can format like this.
With 2024-01-02 it is universally year, month, day (descending in scope). It wouldn't make sense any other way for the sorting reasons you are concerned about. It is very common to use this kind of format, or even 20240102.
@@macmost ..it is NOT “universally” year-month-day. There are countries that use year-day-month. The USA is NOT “The Universe”. As to using alphanumerics for the month, I guess my post was confusing.…. Using letters for the month does not result in a proper sort.
@@ernestgalvan9037 That's not what I mean. I mean when people NAME FILES using dates as filenames. Not when people write or speak dates. Being in the US I always write and say 12/31/2024 or December 31st, 2024. But I would always use 2024-12-31 or 20241231 in filenames or similar. Using year-day-month simply not make sense.
Is there a way to use shortcuts or Automator to add data (text and image) into number? I saw your video on adding data to number using shortcuts but when I try to use variable as image it doesn’t work only the file name. For context I’m trying to add bill image to expense sheet.
Images? No. Images in Numbers are just cell backgrounds anyway. Don't put images of receipts in Numbers data like that. You'll end up with something not very useful and your Numbers file will be huge. Just save receipts as well-named files in well-organized folders in case you need them.
@@macmost At the step where you added the "Make PDF" action, I searched for "make text", and got options to make rich text from HTML or from Markdown. But Apple notes doesn't use HTML or Markdown, AFAIK. Am I missing something? I have the free version of BBEdit, and it offers a "Create Text Document" shortcut. But I assume that would be plain text, not rich text, so I'd lose formatting. I've never used Shortcuts before - I'm in over my head.
@@BobKartyMusic Yes, it is going to take more than just swapping out one action. Not sure how to best help except to suggest learning some more Shortcuts skills first.
Great tutorial and I followed along setting this up, but when I got to Backup. It showed "running", but the Privacy did not pop up at all asking permission to allow and nothing backup into my Notes Backup file as yours showed the files going into the folder????
I am having the same result. The first thing I changed, was recreating the Notes backup folder in iCloud, as I had erroneously created under the regular Documents folder. And yes, I went back into the Shortcuts and re-pointed my wanted results to the Notes Backup folder on iCloud. But even after running it again, I received no error, and it did not work.
@@mebs001 I didn't create the backup folder on the cloud. I did it through my docs, but still under preferences privacy & security I am not seeing even notes to click on
I export individual notes regularly for backups. It's a hassle to export all of them. Thanks to your video I now know how to address that problem. Thanks!
