Simon Willison’s Weblog

9th December 2021 - Link Blog

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.