UWP Win10 Sticky Notes Backup
Slowly but surely, I’m learning to like the new Universal Windows Platform (aka Microsoft Store) version of Sticky Notes in Windows 10. I’ve learned to right click on its entry in the Taskbar to make it disappear from the desktop when I’m not using it. But otherwise, it’s a pretty handy (and attractive) little tool. I entrust it with enough information that I want to make sure it remains available to me, no matter what. That’s why I was tickled to see Sergey Tkachenko’s WinAero story on the tool this morning. Entitled “Backup and Restore Sticky Notes in Windows 10,” it zeroes in on some simple essentials. That’s why I can present UWP Win10 Sticky Notes backup in a single statement: copy the file named plum.sqlite to a safe place! It’s just that easy.
Getting to the file is most of the work. But if you make a copy and keep it on another drive (or UFD), you can restore it by copying it into its home directory.
[Click image for full-sized view.]
Making a UWP Win10 Sticky Notes Backup
The trickiest part to making the backup is navigating to the file. It resides deep in the AppData file hierarchy at:
C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.
MicrosoftStickyNotes_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState
Because the filename is unique, you can use either File Explorer or another search tool to look for it on your Windows drive. I use Voidtools Everything for my searching. It found the file as soon as I’d finished typing most of its name. File Explorer, OTOH, took almost a minute to run it down (on a Skylake i7 PC with 32 GB RAM). Need I say more?
A quick right-click to copy the file to another drive and my backup was complete. Interestingly, when I opened the file in NotePad++, I also observed that you can see multiple versions back inside the plum.sqlite file as well. This could be useful if you ever wanted to go back in time on the contents of the file (the plain text portion shows up as plain text, so you can cut’n’paste it into another file in NotePad++, if you like). Good stuff.