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How to recover deleted text inside Mac OS X sticky notes.

I had a lot of stickies with a lot of information. I clicked on stickies to open them up, and a blank sticky appeared. All the stickies are gone. How could this have happened? Is there a way to get them back?

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closed as exact duplicate by Daniel Beck, Sathya♦ Mar 21 '11 at 13:54

This question covers exactly the same ground as earlier questions on this topic; its answers may be merged with another identical question. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.

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The stickies live in ~/Library/StickiesDatabase. Worse come to worst, I hope you have a backup. If it's corrupted, there's a slight chance you can get things back out of it with strings in a Terminal window.

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The file is 4 kb. Strings only shows a few things like streamtyped, NSMutableArray, NSArray. Does this look empty? – OSX NINJA Mar 19 '11 at 21:36
Effectively, yes; you're seeing the scaffolding around a NeXT/OS X typed stream, but no content. – geekosaur Mar 19 '11 at 21:41
What could have caused this? – OSX NINJA Mar 19 '11 at 21:41
My best guess is that Stickies crashed for some reason while trying to update its database, and the resulting corruption caused the next startup to zero it out. – geekosaur Mar 19 '11 at 21:44
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