Recovering Reminders on my Mac mini with macOS Ventura.

I've discovered that there is no way for me to recover Reminders from Time Machine (they all disappeared after a recent upgrade and even Apple Support could not find them after spending 45 mins trying). I now want to start again and reinstate the list, most items being started from links shared from Notes. I don't trust iCloud for this purpose at all, either. I really want this to be backed up as the previous loss cost me hours of time! Ideally I would like to export/copy all Reminders info including dates and links into another file to be stored on the Mac but this is not possible in Ventura – I can only copy a simple list to be pasted into TextEdit or Pages. Reminders doesn't seem to allow this basic functionality, for whatever reason, so is there perhaps an alternative simple programme I could use? Or can anyone please suggest a workaround?


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Mac mini, macOS 13.4

Posted on Jun 5, 2023 6:17 AM

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Jun 10, 2023 2:14 AM in response to johric

Just in case anyone has arrived here with the same question/problems as me I thought I'd give the best solution I've found since making the post. I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone if you have a better or easier method.


1) I open the note and click the 'share' button to send it to Reminders. I open Reminders, select the new note and then 'Add Date'. So far, so good, (as before) and this is now a really useful tool when you want to remind yourself of a task but can then click on the link to go back to Notes for any complicated instructions or info, for example.


2) To keep a local backup of Reminders I go to File, Print, Save as PDF. This gives a document of a simple list of reminders with dates underneath. But the links icon has disappeared so there is now no way to get to the useful info that you hold on Notes app. IF the info you want to access is brief then you could add it to the reminder where it says 'Notes' at the same time as the date but in my case that is not convenient as the link might be to a copy of a whole web page. However, as the reminder title is the same as the note title it is quite easy to find the info again if needed. In fact you can even save the PDF file as a note itself and have it at the top of Notes app, although there is not much point.


3) So you now have to have confidence that you have an accessible route to recover your notes if you should lose them, and Apple doesn't really provide this either. So I have found a simple app called Exporter available free on the App Store. It saves all the notes as individual files in alphabetical order in a folder. It doesn't save links in the notes, but then neither does iCloud. If you don't have many notes with links then you could go through them before export and manually convert the links to text.


All a bit clunky, but at least everything is saved and can be recovered with a bit of effort. Of course what is really needed is for Apple to enable Reminders and Notes on Time Machine to back up with clear labels and instructions for recovery of app contents.


Jun 5, 2023 8:17 AM in response to johric

johric wrote:

I've discovered that there is no way for me to recover Reminders from Time Machine (they all disappeared after a recent upgrade and even Apple Support could not find them after spending 45 mins trying). I now want to start again and reinstate the list, most items being started from links shared from Notes. I don't trust iCloud for this purpose at all, either.




>AppleID>iCloud I would verify your Reminders are checked here. iCloud is a sync service that would repopulate your Reminders...


Set up iCloud for Reminders on all your devices - Apple Support



if you still have an issue repopulating the Reminders—sign out of your AppleID and back in again.

Sign in or out of your Apple ID on Mac



Still got an issue—

restore items backed up with Time Machine

Restore items backed up with Time Machine on Mac - Apple Support


Jun 5, 2023 9:03 AM in response to leroydouglas

Thanks but, as you say, iCloud is a sync service i.e. not a backup solution. And as I said, I do not want my data stored on iCloud, and as far as I can see from experiment the links to Notes are treated as shared so would not repopulate anyway, even if I could get iCloud to work properly for Reminders list (which I can't). Instructions on that link to Time Machine might work OK for specific documents but after years of meticulously backing up using TM I now see that as a pointless exercise as you can't recover info held in an app such as Reminders – which is why I want to get it out into some sort of document in the first place.

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Recovering Reminders on my Mac mini with macOS Ventura.

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