How to Quickly Recover Deleted Sticky Notes on Windows 10: Best Methods

The Microsoft Sticky Notes app is a lightweight note-taking solution that enables you to jot down ideas or make quick notes in no time at all. But, your sticky notes are just as susceptible to data loss as any other file on your computer.

If you find yourself in a situation where your sticky notes have been lost or deleted, there are ways to restore sticky notes. This article will guide you through various methods you can use to recover deleted sticky notes.

Go to sticky notes recovery ⤵

Check Your Notes List

When you close a sticky note, it doesn’t delete it. Instead, it’s basically minimized. This allows you to clean up your workspace without deleting anything. You can show it again by activating it from the Notes list in Sticky Notes. Follow these steps to access your Notes list.

Note: Since Sticky Notes 3.0, it’s possible for notes to be synced to your Microsoft account. As such, make sure that you’re logged in to the correct account.

1. Open Sticky Notes.
2. Right-click the icon in your taskbar and click Notes list.
3. Open a note from your Notes list by double-clicking it or right-clicking it and selecting Open note.
   

Checking your Notes list first is a great way to find lost sticky notes. If your sticky note wasn’t there, read on to find out ways to recover lost sticky notes.

Where Sticky Notes Are Stored on Windows 10

While your Sticky Notes are saved to the cloud when you’re signed in with a Microsoft account, a local copy is also stored in a sticky notes folder on your computer for when you’re not connected to the internet.

In Windows 7, 8, and 10 (version 1511 or earlier), your Sticky Notes can be found in the following folder with the filename StickyNotes.snt:

%AppData%\Microsoft\Sticky Notes

For users with Windows 10 (version 1607 or later), the Sticky Notes file can be found in the following folder with the filename plum.sqlite:

%LocalAppData%\Packages\Microsoft.MicrosoftStickyNotes_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState.

Knowing where to locate the local version of your sticky notes allows us to recover them in the event of data loss and restore them to their original location, as we’ll touch on in the next section.

How to Recover Deleted Sticky Notes

If you’ve found that your Sticky Notes have disappeared, here are a few methods you can use to find sticky notes that are missing.

Method 1: Recover Using Data Recovery Software

Data recovery software allows you to recover lost or deleted files from your drive. If an event has occurred that rendered your Sticky Notes file corrupted or missing, you can use a data recovery tool like Disk Drill to scan the drive and perform sticky notes recovery.

Disk Drill uses an advanced algorithm to sweep your drive and find data that your operating system can’t see. It’s useful in any data loss situation, even recovering lost Outlook emails. The below steps will show you how to recover sticky notes on Windows 10.

1. Download and open Disk Drill.
2. Select your drive that contains the Sticky Notes files and click Search for lost data.
3. Click Review found items once the scan is complete.
4. Locate the Sticky Notes file. Rather than sift through all the files that Disk Drill found, use the search bar to find the exact file by typing the filename.
5. Mark the file for recovery, then click Recover.
6. Choose a separate physical location for recovery, then press Next.
7. Move the Sticky Notes file to its original location to restore your sticky notes.

If you’re looking for a way to retrieve deleted sticky notes without downloading third-party software, take a look at the following solutions.

Method 2: Check the Notes Folder in Outlook

With the ever-growing move towards cloud-hosted services, it’s no surprise that Microsoft ties your sticky notes to your Microsoft account. One such benefit of this is that your sticky notes can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection. Try checking the Notes folder of your Outlook account to see if the sticky notes are present by following these steps.

1. Go to Outlook.com and sign in to your account.
2. Click Notes.
3. Review your sticky notes. Right-clicking the sticky note in the Notes section will allow you to copy its contents so you can paste it elsewhere if needed.

Method 3: Restore to a Previous Version

This method can help recover recently deleted notes, but only if you’ve enabled the Windows File History backup feature and manually added the Sticky Notes app database file location (see above) to the backup list. If these conditions are met, you can restore the Sticky Notes file to a previous version, effectively rolling back to a point in time when the deleted sticky notes were still present.

Follow these steps to recover deleted sticky notes on Windows 10 by restoring the file to a previous version.

1. Navigate to your Sticky Notes folder.
2. Right-click the Sticky Notes file (either StickyNotes.snt or plum.sqlite) and click Restore previous versions.
3. Select a previous version of the file and click Restore.

Is your file versions list empty? Unfortunately that means no previous versions of your Sticky Notes file were backed up. In this case, you need to try other recovery methods.

Method 4: Recover Note Content From the File

If you’re running an earlier version of Windows 10, you can manually restore the contents of your notes directly from the hidden Sticky Notes file if it’s still intact.

Follow these steps to recover your notes from the StickyNotes.snt file:

1. Press Win + R on your keyboard to bring up the Run interface.
2. Type %appdata% and press Enter or press OK.
3. Open the Microsoft folder, then open the Sticky Notes folder.
4. Right-click StickyNotes.snt and open it with Notepad.
5. Find your notes. You can use the Find function (Ctrl + F) to scan the document for keywords to find your notes.
6. Copy the contents to new notes and fix the formatting.

How to Back up Sticky Notes on Windows 10

Keeping a backup of your Sticky Notes file ensures you can easily restore it to working order following a data loss situation. The below steps will guide you through backing up the Sticky Notes file using File History, a backup utility that’s built-in to Windows.

1. Right-click Start and click Settings.
2. Select Update & Security.
3. Click Backup.
4. Click Add a drive and select a drive.
5. Click More options.
6. Click Add a folder.
7. Navigate to the Sticky Notes folder located at either %AppData%\Microsoft\Sticky Notes or %LocalAppData%\Packages\Microsoft.MicrosoftStickyNotes_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState and click Choose this folder to add it to the list of folders that are backed up by File History.

Conclusion

If you accidentally deleted your Sticky Notes notes, or otherwise lost them following a data loss event, you can still recover them if you act quickly enough. The key here is to recover your plum.sqlite file (or StickyNotes.snt on older Windows versions) which contains all of your notes.

You can recover the notes using data recovery software to restore the necessary Sticky Notes file. You can also check your Notes folder in Outlook to see if the notes were synced there. Alternatively, if you have File History set up, you might be able to restore the Sticky Notes file to a previous version.

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