How do I recover a closed Sticky Note in Windows?

Question

By accident, I closed my sticky notes in Windows. Is there any way to recover them?

Solution 1

There will still be something of a ghost remaining in the file where Sticky Notes save the notes to. This can be found in

%AppData%\Microsoft\Sticky Notes\StickyNotes.snt

I was able to recover a deleted note from there simply by searching for a part of its contents and the plain text is usually pretty good copyable from there, unless you have some heavy formatting in the middle of it—then you have to deal with RTF. :-)

Solution 2

It is much too easy to delete the sticky notes. Here are two ways to recover:
1) There may be old information left in the file in the App Data directory:

%AppData%\Microsoft\Sticky Notes\StickyNotes.snt

2) If your Windows 7 version supports it, right click on the folder and select "Restore Previous Versions" This is useful for getting back a note from yesterday, last week, etc.

Since clicking the [X] on the note actually deletes it, rather than just closing the note, it can be useful to turn on the Sticky Note delete warning.

Open the Registry Editor and navigate to the following key :

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\StickyNotes

Either delete the value PROMPT_ON_DELETE or set its value to 1.

Comments

[Admin]

how to open sticky notes 'StickyNotes.snt' file: pcworld.com/article/191453/sticky_notes.html Thanks @Moab

[levininja]

This worked perfectly...I just had to take the text and replace "tab" with " " and so forth.

[FFI]

Dears, is it possible to restore old Sticky notes after windows 7 format?

[Joey]

@FFI: Restore from your backup. If you don't have one, you're out of luck. (Which is kinda the obvious answer, actually).