I just bought a new MacBook Pro and am copying everything over from my MacBook Air. Going well, except I can’t figure out how to get my “stickies” notes copied. What’s the secret?
“Stickies” is a perfect example of an app that should be iCloud enabled, in my opinion. “Notes” is and it’s darn useful to be able to access your iPhone notes on your Mac, and vice versa, but for some reason Stickies is rooted in the earliest design generation of the Mac, almost a demo program for new programmers at Apple!
There is a way to export and import individual sticky notes, of course, but if you have a bunch of them, that’s way tedious and – fortunately! – unnecessary! You will need to get some ninja macOS skills ready for this one, however, and we’ll need to start out on the old computer.
Before we do, I well know the experience of using Stickies to keep track of things just to find that you launch it on the new computer post-migration and see this:
So not what you want to see!
Now, pull out your old computer and open the Finder to your home directory. Your window will look like this:
The folder you want isn’t shown, unfortunately: you need to get to your Library folder and that’s hidden from regular users so that you don’t mess things up. To get to it you need to choose “Go To Folder…” from the Go menu:
You can see there are a lot of choices on your system in terms of jumping directly to a location on your file system. When you choose “Go to Folder…” it pops up a small window, and this is where you type in “~/Library/” as shown:
Click on “Go” and it’ll open up a Finder window with that folder:
I’ve scrolled down a bit because the file you want to grab and copy to the new MacBook Pro is sitting right there amidst all the dozens of folders: StickiesDatabase. You can email it to yourself, copy it to a flash drive, save it to DropBox or another cloud service, whatever. Once you’ve grabbed it, you’re done with the old computer and can put it away.
Now on the new computer quit Stickies if it’s running, then make sure you can identify and find the newly copied file (tip: I just save it to my Desktop), then go through the same Go > Go to Folder… process to move to the ~/Library/ folder on the new computer. Now simply copy the new StickiesDatabase into the folder (optionally renaming the original first if you’d like) so it looks like this:
That’s all there is to it. Now restart Stickies and all your old notes show up!
A bit tricky with the need to get to the hidden ~/Library folder, but otherwise fairly straightforward. Now, enjoy that new computer!
How do you type in that little, squiggly line in front of /Library/?
The squiggly line is a “tilde” and on most Mac keyboards it’s the shift option above the back-tic, just below the Esc key. If not, you can also generate it typographically with Option-n followed by a space. Want to type señor correctly? Use Option-n then ‘n’ or, another handy Mac trick: press and hold down on the ‘n’ key. (you can do that latter trick with almost any letter to get variants that include accents or other diacriticals)
Don’t bother. While you have the “Go” menu open push down the Option key and you will see Library magically appear.
But JFYI that is a tilde and is the Cap on the key left of the 1! key on a US English keyboard. 3rd party boards can put almost anywhere.
Dave,
We’re having the same problem as Michael Cary had. (post #2)
We’re moving many stickies from a MacBook Air to a MacBook Pro.
Air is running Mojave and Pro is running Big Sur.
The only difference I see on the new computer after transferring Stickies is under the “Kind” column in the Library its listed as a Unix Executable File. Could that be the problem why we can’t see the transferred Stickies?
Thanks,
Bob
When you exported the Stickies, did you choose RTF or RTFD? Typically if you’re seeing a “Unix Executable File” in the Finder it’s more related to file permissions than the contents of the file. Try re-exporting as RTFD, copy the file across (or email it to yourself!) and try importing that file to see if it works in the new Stickies. Should be 100% compatible…
I found a solution to Michael and Shadow’s problem. I found it here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250728309
Good luck!
I’ve done this before seamlessly. Not today. iMac 2012 is getting retired and moving some data manually to a MacBook Pro 2015 13″ and each time place the stickies over the original file on the 2015 Pro I see the data in the file but when opening the app its a single blank sticky. I’m floored and don’t get it. I see the time change onto file I copied over and then see in text edit my data is in there but won’t open the old stickies. Exact same OS, exact. mystery unsolved!!
did you find any solution? I am facing the same issue.
Just want to say how fabulous your instructions were! I’m a reasonably intelligent woman, but not in a techie kind of way. I searched the internet for some time to find out how to copy the Stickies from one Mac to another, having seen somewhere by chance that this was possible, and was getting highly frustrated by the “shorthand” instructions given presumably for people who have a fair amount of knowledge already. Delighted to have finally come across your article here, step by step, exactly what I needed and worked first time. Brilliant, brilliant, thank you!
Thanks. Much appreciated, Jan!
I had a similar experience as Jan, and very much appreciate your simple step by step guide. Great Job. God bless. Thank you.