Sticky Notes content lost - any chance to recover?

Hello everybody!
I have windows 7 and run “sticky notes” program for 4 years quite fine. All of a sudden, a week ago, without me doing anything specific, the content of them disappeared, but not the program. I can still open the program but it appears only a new empty sticky note and all the others are gone. I gave up the old notes and started new ones, after 2 days they disappeared again! What do I do wrong? Thank you for answering me.

The sticky notes are stored in the following location (you'll need to enable the viewing of hidden files and folders to see it):

C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Sticky Notes

You can try opening that file in Wordpad and searching for the plain text that is viewable or you can try restoring that folder to a previous version to see if you can recover the notes that way.

Previous Versions - Restore Files and Folders

Thousand thanks! It worked!
The last question is, why do they dissapear like that, over night? How can i prevent that to happen?
wish you all the best!

Great!

To be honest, I have no clue why they might disappear unexpectedly. We'd have to know much more of the surrounding circumstances to attempt to figure that one out. At the very least, make sure you are up to date on your Windows updates and Antivirus definitions. It wouldn't be unheard of for malware to cause such things.

You'll need to have them enabled in msconfig>Startup for Sticky Notes to restart with Windows. Startup Programs - Change

You're using faulty logic. Just because you've never fixed a problem using SFC /scannow doesn't mean it doesn't work. That just means the problems you've encountered weren't applicable to the fix that service provides. I've never fixed a lost partition using Partition Recovery software but that doesn't mean they never work for anything.
SFC does often fix Windows file integrity issues. Plenty of people on here have used it and experienced it doing that.

This problem was already addressed and fixed, per kamemono's second post in the thread here. Feel free to take the advice I gave earlier in the thread and apply it to your customer's issue to see if that fixes it.

The issue was solved so my comments were only for others finding the thread to remind them that if they clean out msconfig they need to keep stikynot.exe to expect them to start with Windows.

In addition best practices here require us to have OP's run SFC -SCANNOW Command if anything strange is indicated with System Files which is not another known issue.

The fact that when I run SFC myself it rarely finds anything has no bearing on the fact that almost every day an OP finds System Files to fix here in the Forums.

gregrocker and Fligi7

Thanks for posting two weeks after the last post in this thread.

In order of importance

(1) To say that the problem was Solved is technically correct but from a common sense point of view is ridiculous !! Recovering the text in lost sticky notes is hardly the problem; it is getting stickynotes to work going forward for someone who uses that feature. Come on, do people put their tax return OR ANY OTHER important data in a stickynote ? No. They put it in a PDF or spreadsheet or Word doc or etc in their My Documents folder or on the desktop or in the (for some users) the Music folder or the Quicken/Quickbooks data folder etc etc etc.

That is putting "the cart before the horse". Even the thread poster said this after thanking the solver here for recovering the lost text "...why do they dissapear like that, over night? How can i prevent that to happen?". ie he did not just say IT'S ALL DONE THERE IS NO MORE. And I see no response from the original poster that THAT problem was ever solved.

HOWEVER, I am new to the sevenforums. Are you saying that because the original poster (unwisely in my opinion) marked this as Solved, that forum protocol indicates that I should post the issue AGAIN in my own thread because other forum contributors are unlikely to post in a "Solved" thread ??

Please reply on this as I will be happy to create my own thread on this subject.

(2) Regarding sfc \scannow please note that I did say " I am speaking here of a "low probability" of a fix that way, not that it never works." Both your replies here do NOT acknowledge that I said that. Furthermore I get paid by the hour. I have to decide what is the most efficient way to solve a problem based on my 7 years of experience fixing PCs and sfc /scannow is just not one of them. Other contributors here or people in my profession may have another opinion but that is mine.

Also this is a 3 month old PC with two 250 gb solid state drives in a striped RAID config (a literal $4,500 state of the art Sony laptop). The chance that file corruption of any kind has occurred in that period is low.

Given that the time frame when the problem occurred for the original poster here (3 weeks ago) is very similar to my customer (2 - 3 weeks ago) the possibility of a unintended error from a Windows update (or from a Norton scan etc) is higher I think than from a corrupt system file. I doubt that the engineers at MS check their latest update against stickynotes functionality as it is (in my experience) a little used feature. (It is not even in the Start>All programs menu; few customers ever go to the Accessories folder in my experience.

(3) What would REALLY help here is a sevenforums expert who has ACTUALLY experienced the problem and solved it OR can point me to a link where it is solved (the REAL problem, not recovering the lost text). I have done a fairly extensive google search and the only match was to THIS thread.


Mike