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I have two laptops and both have different Notes that are useful to me.

Not wanting to share any such data with Apple, they are also not synced to iCloud.

So far, I found the path where they are stored:

~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes

And see that the "DB" behind this is sqlite.

Is there any way to export all all the content in one directory and then clear all notes so the files can be re-imported?

I could see perhaps altering a bit the sqlite DB (or merge the two) and then have my notes from both Macs in one place in the end but lack a starting point or guide. I know iCloud sync is the easy way, but consider confidential data from clients where we agreed not to store the data online or transfer / store it external to the Mac in question.

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  • Great use case - we also have data we don’t want in a cloud - even one backed by someone as privacy conscious as Apple that doesn’t index / search / sell / mine the words to sell advertising and user profile data to even more third parties.
    – bmike ♦
    Nov 18 '17 at 19:28
  • Was thinking of an experiment. Dumping the sqlite DB on both laptops, merging the txt resulting from the dump, recreating the db out of it (hopefully no conflicting entries), copying all the content in the same place (the files). Test :)
    – Mihai
    Nov 19 '17 at 8:07
  • As pointed out by a friend, it seems the sqlite that I need is in fact here: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Notes/NotesV6.storedata Not sure what the other one is though and how they relate. He also pointed out some tables like: ZATTACHMENT, ZNOTE, ZNOTEBODY si ZFOLDER Next step...if no one has another solution, would be to start reverse engineering them.
    – Mihai
    Nov 19 '17 at 21:39
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You can use Exporter (free app from app store) to save all notes as text to a folder on your computer. Then import them into other notes.

It likely did work equivalent or extending on this reverse-engineering effort to get data from the database that backs the application:

You could also just set up an IMAP server (even on your Mac) to sync up and then merge down the notes. iCloud isn’t the only server that can sync notes.

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