Salvage Data from Local Database - Inkdrop User Manual

If you lost your password and cannot authenticate anymore, it means unfortunately that you have lost your account because your data is encrypted in client. Please try troubleshooting once again in order to check if you certainly lost the account.

However, there is still a chance to salvage your data if you haven't uninstalled the desktop app yet. It stores your data without encrypting in local database. You can use our tool to extract data as backup files from it. Follow the below steps to try that.

Inkdrop local database extractor

The tool is published on npm as inkdrop-localdb-extract.

Requirements

NodeJS >= 24.16
Inkdrop v6 or later

Using Inkdrop v5 or earlier?

Inkdrop v5 and earlier store the local database in a different format. Use the previous version of the tool instead by running npx inkdrop-localdb-extract@0, which requires NodeJS >= 12.

How to salvage data

You can run the tool with npx without installing it:

npx inkdrop-localdb-extract --help

Options:
      --version  Show version number                                   [boolean]
  -s, --src      The path to the source database file
                 (ex: "~/Library/Application
                 Support/inkdrop/db/56ab08396cec2c0f87492c9a0f005f86.sqlite")
                                                             [string] [required]
  -d, --dest     The path to the destination directory       [string] [required]
      --help     Show help                                             [boolean]

Your database file can be found at the following path:

on macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/inkdrop/db/<USER_ID>.sqlite
on Windows: %APPDATA%\inkdrop\db\<USER_ID>.sqlite
on Linux: ~/.config/inkdrop/db/<USER_ID>.sqlite

USER_ID looks something like 56ab08396cec2c0f87492c9a0f005f86.

For example:

npx inkdrop-localdb-extract --src /path/to/db/<USER_ID>.sqlite --dest /path/to/store

Then, you should get backup files in the specified destination directory. The tool opens the database in read-only mode, so it never modifies your local data.

Deleted notes

The tool also salvages notes, notebooks, tags, and files that you deleted on this device. Their last revisions before the deletion are exported into the _deleted folder. If you want to restore any of them, move the files from the _deleted folder to the data folder before restoring.

Documents deleted on another device can't be salvaged, because only their deletion records are synced to this device.

Migrate data to new account

If you successfully salvaged data, now you can restore it to new account. If you would like to migrate the payment information of your old account, please contact us. We will migrate your payment information and delete the old account.

Inkdrop local database extractor

Requirements

How to salvage data

Deleted notes

Migrate data to new account

See also