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I've been using an app named CourseNotes for college and just noticed it has not been updated since 2014. I've used it for years and has a lot of important notes in it, and I don't seem to get the same functionality in apps like EverNote.

In the new upcoming macOS, is there a chance it will break and I will lose this data?

I've been scanning the Internet for days and I can't seem to find a good answer. Contacting the developer has resulted in no answers whatsoever.

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It will most likely still work, but there's also a chance that it won't. No one can say until someone has tried it and even if you find someone who can confirm that it works for them, you should still be cautious as there is no guarantee that it will work for you.

CourseNotes looks to have been abandoned by the developers. There have been no further updates on the app's site or the developer's twitter or facebook accounts since 2014.

This means that you should really think about how important the content that you have input into the app is to you and for how long you will want to continue to access it. If you have invested a lot into it and you want to continue to access the information long term, you need to look at how to migrate your data out of it and into something else.

If you still want to upgrade your OS, you need to ensure that you have a backup that you can revert to if you find that after you update CourseNotes doesn't work.

The simplest thing to do is to create a bootable image of your computer's hard drive onto an external hard drive. You will need an external hard drive that is at least as big as the space taken on your internal hard drive. You can create the image by using an app like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. Once the image backup is done, test it to make sure that you can boot your computer from it.

Once this is done, you can complete the OS update and confirm if the app still works. If it doesn't, boot from the external image drive and clone it back onto your internal drive.

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    You said "You will need an external hard drive that is the same size as your internal hard drive." and that is not true. It can be larger or even smaller and in the case of the latter it just has to be slightly bigger then the space already consumed. As an example, my first MBP had a 120 GB HDD and I routinely imaged it to a 40 GB HDD when all I had on it was less then 40 GB, did my testing and then moved on. – user3439894 Sep 8 '16 at 0:52
  • @user3439894 you are correct. I should have said that the external drive needs to be at least the size of the used space on the internal drive plus a small buffer. However, if someone needs to buy an external drive for the purpose of creating a bootable image, it would be best to get one the same size so that it can continue to be used for future incremental backup images. – pdd Sep 8 '16 at 3:19
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Yes applications can break when a new OS is introduced. The APIs that it calls could have been changed or possibly removed.

This is why many apps will get updated just after an OS release and why developers get a beta test of the OS so they can check.

If the developer is not active anymore then you have to be the one who tests it. In large organisations there is often a complex plan to upgrade an OS: all the applications that the organisation uses have to be tested before agreement to update the OS is given. This is one reason many organisations have stayed on old versions of Windows (e.g. Windows XP) because they can't get all apps to pass or no-one has given the budget to test.

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