How to Recover Deleted Notes on Laptop in Windows 11/10/8/7

Sticky Notes is one convenient notes app that lets us make quick notes in no time. However, the tool does not have an archive feature and your notes will disappear when you click the delete button. What if you accidentally delete some important notes? Fortunately, there are ways to get them back. Here in this guide, I’ll show you how to recover deleted notes on laptop in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7.

Way 1. How to recover deleted notes on laptop via Outlook

With the development of cloud services, Microsoft has linked your sticky notes to your Microsoft account. When you delete a note, a copy of that note will be stored in Outlook's Trash folder. So you can go to your Outlook account to check if you can find the deleted notes.

• Open a browser and go to Outlook.com.
• Sign in with your Microsoft account.
• Choose Notes in the left sidebar. (Or you can choose Deleted Items option).

• When you find the deleted notes you need, just copy and paste them to another space.

Way 2. How to recover deleted notes on laptop from .snt Files

When you are not connected to the Internet, a local copy of the notes is saved in the Sticky Notes folder. Therefore, there is a chance to recover deleted sticky notes on laptop from the .snt files.

1. Press Windows key and R key together to open Run box.

2. Copy and paste the command to access the Sticky Notes folder.

• In Windows 7, 8, and 10 (version 1511 or earlier), you should type %AppData%\Microsoft\Sticky Notes
• In Windows 10 (version 1607 or later), you should type %LocalAppData%\Packages\Microsoft.MicrosoftStickyNotes_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState

3. Hit Enter to access the folder.

4. Find the .snt file or plum.sqlite file. (If you cannot find .snt file or plum.sqlite file, please move to the following solutions to find them.)

5. Right-click the file and open it with a text editor like Word or Notepad.

6. Usually, the editor will ask you to decode the file, just choose the default actions to continue.

7. When it is complete, you can take advantage of the search feature (Ctrl+F) to find the notes.

Way 3. How to recover deleted notes on laptop via File History

If you have enabled File History feature, then you can try to retrieve deleted notes on laptop from the backup files created by File History. File History keeps some of the previous versions of files and allows users to restore files to a previous version. Therefore, you can try to roll back to a point time when the notes were still present.

• Go to Start > Search for Sticky Notes.
• Right-click the Sticky Notes folder and choose Properties option.
• Go to Previous Versions tab.
• If there is a previous version, just choose it and click Restore > Apply > OK to recover it.

• Then you can follow the steps in way 2 to decode the file.

Way 4. How to recover deleted notes on laptop via data recovery tool

If you still cannot find the .snt files or files plum.sqlite file, then you can rely on data recovery tool to help you scan the drive and find them. As long as they have not been overwritten by new data, then data recovery software can find them.

Here we choose MyRecover as an example. It is an ideal tool for those who don't know much about Windows. All you have to do is click the scan button and the tool will automatically find the deleted and lost files. What’s more, you can search the files you need via keywords.

Outstanding features of ADR for Windows

● Supports Data Recovery in Various Situations. System crashes, accidental deletion, virus attacks, disk formatting, etc.
● Supports Any Kind of Disk-based Storage Media. SSD, HDD, USB flash drive, external hard drive, SD card, etc.
● Recover Any Types of Files in Original Format. Documents, texts, pictures, videos, audios, emails, compressed files, etc.
● Highly-Compatible. Supports NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, ReFS in Windows 11/10/8/7. (Compatible with 64-bit and 32-bit OS.)
● High-Speed. With an advanced scan engine and robust data recovery algorithm, ADR for Windows can find and recover deleted or lost data at a very high speed.

You can click the download button to get the tool and follow the steps below to retrieve deleted notes on laptop. Scanning your laptop is completely free and you can recover up to 500MB of files.

• Run MyRecover > Hover the mouse over the drive saved deleted files before, and click Scan.

• The deleted and lost files found by the tool will be listed on the right side. You can type .snt files or files plum.sqlite file in the search box to quickly find them.

• You can recover any file during the scanning process, so when you see the deleted .snt files or files plum.sqlite file, you can immediately select them and click the Recover button to move them to a safe place.
• After the .snt file/plum.sqlite file has been recovered, you can find the notes as explained in way 2.

Final words

That’s all about how to recover deleted notes on laptop. If you can find the.snt files or files plum.sqlite file, then you can retrieve the lost notes. To avoid deleting notes by mistake next time, you can go to Settings and enable the Confirm before deleting option. In this way, when you click the trash icon, a window will pop up asking you if you want to delete this note and you can choose to delete or keep it.