Is there a way to migrate notes on my mac to a new user in catalina?

GavrielTech wrote:

I got another macbook pro with catalina, i used my icloud account during the initial start up process but then realized that i dont have a time machine back up or target disk set up to migrate local notes saved on my older macbook pro,

i found info online to locate my notes on the older macbook pro (user/library/containers and group containers/apple notes etc)

i successfully copied the older ON MY MAC local notes into my new macbook pro user libray directly

minutes after they (both icloud synced folders and ON MY MAC local notes) successfully appeared in notes all my icloud notes vanished.

i repeated the process and the same thing happened again and again.

i then figured to erase all my icloud synced folders and start over once i safely dragged my icloud synced folders in notes into ON MY MAC local notes section while offline but when trying this i got a message saying shared folders cant be moved...but its not a shared folder!

i managed to drag synced iCloud notes one by one into ON MY MAC local notes section but they vanished on me after a few minutes even while i was offline!

anyone know how to fix all this so my notes are back up and running?

any advise appreciated

If your notes are in ICloud, once you log in to iCloud with the same Apple ID—and check the boxes on your new machine it will populare the new computer with your notes.

>System Preferences>Apple ID>iCLoud

Change your iCloud settings - Apple Support

IT's hard to follow what you actually did. I think the problem with losing the iCloud Notes items stemmed from you moving them, rather than copying them. Once they are deleted (moved) from Notes on a Mac using iCloud, they are deleted from iCloud (and all other devices on iCloud).

I am also surprised you did this without a backup. The easiest way to migrate things like Notes is to use Migration Assistant on the new Mac with an external backup of the old Mac.

If there is a way to recreate all your Notes the way you want them, simply place all of them in iCloud on your old Mac -- including the On My Mac ones, just create a new folder within your iCloud Notes and put the On My Mac Notes in there -- and then when the new Mac connects to iCloud, it will be synchronized and have the identical Notes. There is no need to do the manual moving, which obviously is fraught with complications.

Did all of iCloud stop working for you (that would be a problem with your iCloud account across the board), or is it just Notes that stopped synchronizing?

If it is just Notes, I think moving folders from those Library containers (which are normally hidden from the user to even see, for good reasons, to prevent things like this) may have stopped Notes from synchronizing. On another computer, those folders might not be recognized the same way as they are on the computer they came from. Keep in mind, for synchronization to work, each device needs to be able to tell iCloud what it has and the history of what was changed on that device, so that can be propagated across all the devices. That information may be embedded in those folders, but by moving them, the synchronization process has become tangled across devices. I don't think iCloud can tell what was changed, where, anymore. Also by MOVING instead of copying the information, iCloud thinks it was DELETED from that device. Can you move them back (restore them) to their original locations? It might be possible to restart the synchronization again.

"im afraid of putting the notes on icloud, not only are they 100gb+ but the chances of them getting scattered are 50/50"

I don't understand that comment at all. They can't synchronize unless they are all (100 GB, all of it) in iCloud. How else are you expecting them to synchronize?

Maybe the way forward is to try to restore your original computer to the way it was (can you restore it from a backup?), verify that Notes works properly, and then back up everything up to an external drive (or update the backup you have), and use that to migrate (Migration Assistant). Not having USB-C is not an obstacle, you can easily get adaptors so the backup drive can be used on older USB as well as newer USB-C connectors, or you can connect the two computers directly through ethernet.

Please, I hope you won't say that you don't have a backup for a computer with 100 GB of Notes materials?

"my hope is to find out if i have to modify some file that refuses to allow the use of note based on firmware"

I would advise against that - modifying files (firmware?) and this type of tinkering carries a high risk of breaking additional functionality.

100 GB is a lot of Notes! I won't even ask what that's about, but with such a massive investment in Notes, I'd put a priority on using the Migration tools that Apple recommends and supports. Modifying or moving/deleting files inside Library folders and Containers is known to be risky and I'd suggest instead use of an Apple supported method -- iCloud if you can reconstruct it; or Migration Assistant -- instead. I have used Migration Assistant many times (at least a dozen) and it has always migrated my Notes (and everything else) without a hitch, except that a few times I had to reinstall some printer drivers.