Stickies app data missing after upgrade or migration

Problem

• Lost Sticky notes upgrading to macOS Catalina

• Losing my mind. How can I import my StickiesDatabase file, from High Sierra, to Big Sur?

• Stickies did not migrate from High Sierra to new M3 macbook

• How do I move Stickies files from Mojave to Sequoia?

• Stickies disappeared when reinstalling OSX Ventura after log in issues.

• How to migrate Stickies database from Mojave to Catalina?

• Stickies Database file location on Catalina 10.15

macOS Mojave and earlier store sticky notes in a single file, ~/Library/StickiesDatabase. Catalina and later use ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Stickies/ (Finder displays it as ~/Library/Containers/Stickies/), with RTFD files in ./Data/Library/Stickies/ and note color and window positioning data stored in ./Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Stickies.plist.

For many macOS upgrade scenarios that straddle this divide (e.g., High Sierra to Sequoia), the database migration silently fails. Even in the best case (as when upgrading from Mojave to Catalina), colors revert to yellow and window positioning is lost.

Solutions

• Stickies.app 10.2 (build 138) from macOS 10.14.6 can be copied to Tahoe alongside ~/Library/StickiesDatabase and runs successfully; colors and window positions are preserved. "Export Text…" (Plain Text, RTF, RTFD) works; "Export All to Notes…" does not.

• If preserving sticky note colors isn't necessary, simply restore ~/Library/StickiesDatabase to a clean macOS 10.15, 11, 12, or 13 instance; Stickies will populate com.apple.Stickies from it on first launch (fails under macOS 14, 15, & 26).

• 1. In Mojave, restore a backup of ~/Library/StickiesDatabase. 2. Optionally export to Notes.app (File → Export All to Notes…) for posterity; colors are preserved as folder names. The Notes database (~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes) can be imported as-is into modern macOS versions. 3. Upgrade Mojave to Catalina; com.apple.Stickies can now be imported into later versions including Tahoe. Colors must be manually corrected (or perhaps scripted to extract values from StickiesDatabase and insert into com.apple.Stickies.plist, an exercise left for the reader). Windows can be un-stacked via AppleScript; this example (tested in Catalina and Tahoe) uses a 5-column layout:

  tell application "Stickies" to activate
  
  tell application "System Events"
      tell process "Stickies"
          set winList to windows
          set winCount to count of winList
  
          set numColumns to 5
          set noteWidth to 300
          set noteHeight to 200
          set xGap to 20
          set yGap to 20
          set baseX to 50
          set baseY to 50
  
          repeat with i from 1 to winCount
              set colIndex to ((i - 1) mod numColumns)
              set rowIndex to ((i - 1) div numColumns)
              set theWin to item i of winList
              set position of theWin to {baseX + colIndex * (noteWidth + xGap), baseY + rowIndex * (noteHeight + yGap)}
              set size of theWin to {noteWidth, noteHeight}
          end repeat
      end tell
  end tell

Related: Stickies extraction scripts

• Stickies.app Exporter: "Run this script to export your Stickies in RTF format."

• pystickies: "Converts the database from the Mac's 'Stickies' program into RTF files, one per sticky. This is platform-independent, it doesn't use Cocoa to do the conversion, but rather uses heuristics to find the RTF data within the Stickies database."

• pytypedstream: "A pure Python, cross-platform library/tool for reading Mac OS X and NeXTSTEP typedstream files. ... the typedstream data format is still used by some macOS components and applications, such as the Stickies and Grapher applications."

• StickiesDbConverter: "Brief python script for exporting a StickiesDatabase file on macOS to a plain text file."

• macOS_stickies.py: "parse osx sticky databases."

❧ 2026-04-04