Simon Willison’s Weblog

Notes on Notes.app. Apple's Notes app keeps its data in a SQLite database at ~/Library/Group\ Containers/group.com.apple.notes/NoteStore.sqlite - but it's pretty difficult to extract data from. It turns out the note text is stored as a gzipped protocol buffers object in the ZICNOTEDATA.ZDATA column. Steve Dunham did the hard work of figuring out how it all works - the complexity stems from Apple's use of CRDT's to support seamless multiple edits from different devices.