Deleted notes, Recently Deleted, and Archives

Two safety nets: the 30-day Recently Deleted window, and plain-text archives on disk.

Your data Updated 27 July 2026

Recently Deleted

When you delete a note it moves to Recently Deleted and stays there for 30 days before it is gone for good. Its reminders go with it: they stop firing while the note is deleted, and they come back with it when you restore it. To bring a note back, open Recently Deleted from the Library and restore it. Restoring puts a note on your desktop, so it needs a running trial or an activated license.

One kind of note skips all of this. Delete a note with nothing in it and Notel simply drops it, rather than filling Recently Deleted with blanks.

Archives

Notel also keeps a second copy on disk. Unless you switch off Auto archive note on delete (Settings → Advanced), a deleted note is written out as a plain text file in the Notel archives folder, with its attachments in a sidecar folder next to it. These are ordinary files you can open in Finder (“Open archives folder” in Settings takes you there), and they are never deleted automatically; they remain until you delete them.

Two kinds are left out. Locked notes are not archived automatically, since a plain-text copy would defeat the lock, and blank notes are skipped along with everything else. Locked notes rely on Recently Deleted alone.

Settings has a “Clear archives older than 30 days…” button. That prune is permanent, and Notel asks before doing it. If there is nothing old enough to clear, it will tell you so.

The order of operations when something is missing

1. Check the Fan / Library: the note may just be closed, not deleted.
2. Check Recently Deleted: 30-day window.
3. Check another synced Mac: if sync was off on one machine, the note may still be there.
4. If the loss followed a first sync, the pre-sync snapshot is still on disk, but there is no restore button for it. Open Settings → Advanced → Attachment Storage → Open attachments folder, go up one level to the Notel folder, and look inside Backups/. Copy what you need back out by hand, and take a duplicate of the whole folder before you start.