Deleted notes, Recently Deleted, and Archives

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. Any active reminders on the note are removed at delete time. To bring a note back, open Recently Deleted from the Library and restore it.

Archives

Notel also keeps a second copy on disk. Unless you switch off Auto archive note on delete (Settings → Advanced), every deleted note is also written 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.

One exception: locked notes are not archived, since a plain-text copy would defeat the lock. They 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.