Once on screen, stickies will remain where placed until closed, even through reboots.Once created, they will stay on screen until you take them away. They are instead yellow rectangular windows onto which you can put some text notes. The tool will never support animated dancing figures, or play 'Greensleeves'. Stickies stores information in a single text-based ini file. The software will not mess with your system files, or write to the registry. The design goal behind Stickies is that the program is small and simple. It is a computerized version of those notes. Is there any way to restore the data in that file? It's already in the proper location, and I certainly haven't hand edited.Stickies is a PC utility I wrote to try to cut down on the number of yellow notes I was leaving stuck to my monitor. After closing and re-opening Stickies with that one crazy one, all my notes were gone again. I tried Stickies' File > Import Text, but that just loaded the raw binary format for all my old notes into a single new note, instead of really grokking the database and restoring the notes inside.

Simply putting the file in the location expected by the app is not sufficient, evidently. Maybe if I could read it using bash or node, but I don't know anything about the file format.Īnyway, for whatever reason, when I run the Stickies app, it doesn't show that data in any of its notes. I have way too many notes for it to be practical to manually copy-and-paste from that format, and I'm not even sure I can read it properly myself. It's embedded in an illegible binary file, whose format I know nothing about. That file exists, and both TextEdit and bash strings reveal that my note data is in there. The web tells me Stickies stores that data in a file at ~/Library/StickiesDatabase. It appears that data isn't actually lost. I don't know why, but when I upgraded to the latest MacOS (to 10.15.2, from whatever was the big release before it), all my sticky notes disappeared. I've been using it on this Mac for like 5 years.