Bear is a note taking app for mac and ios, which syncs via icloud. Unfortunately, at the moment there is no way to automatically back up all of your notes outside of icloud.

Thankfully, the format of the notes is fairly simple - all notes are kept in an sqlite database and images/file attachments are kept in a folder nearby.

This script will read the sqlite database and dump all of your notes into individual .bearnote files, which can be stored in somewhere like dropbox and imported back into bear directly.

The script requires python 3 to be installed, but doesn't require any custom modules. It can be run directly from the git checkout or any other location if desired.

Alternatively, there is a homebrew formula to install using homebrew:

brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mivok/bear_backup/master/Formula/bear_backup.rb

The homebrew script also provides a launchctl module to back up every night at midnight to a dropbox directory. If you want to use this, run:

brew service start bear_backup

At a minimum, you need to specify a directory to back up to:

bear_backup.py ~/Dropbox/backups/bear

The script will grab all of your notes from bear and create individual .bearnote files in the backup directory.

If you want to remove any notes from an existing backup that have been deleted from bear, then you will also want to add the -r option:

bear_backup.py -r ~/Dropbox/backups/bear

This will clean up any notes in the backup directory that have been deleted from bear, and is useful when you run the script against the same backup directory multiple times. Without this, you will end up with stale notes in the backup that are no longer in bear.

• -v, --verbose - Print out additional information, such as which notes are being backed up and any old notes that are removed.
• -d, --debug - This will bring up an interactive python console rather than back up any notes. This is only used during development.
• -f, --force - By default, bear_backup won't overwrite any notes from an old backup if the note hasn't been modified in bear. It does this by comparing modification times of the backed up file. Set --force to disable this behavior and always back up all notes, overwriting any existing files.
• -n, --dry-run - Don't back up or remove any notes, just show what would be done. Implies --verbose.
• -o, --notify - Prints a desktop notification once the backup is complete. This is useful when run as a scheduled task.
• -r, --remove - Remove any bearnote files from the destination that aren't in the list of notes to be backed up. In other words, this will remove any notes from an existing backup that have been deleted from bear.

The files are stored as individual .bearnote files, which you can import directly into bear using bear's import option. They are stored like this rather than as a single file to allow you to restore individual notes as needed.

Alternatively, just double click on a note in finder and it will be imported into bear.

A .bearnote file is just a zip file, and is a variation on the textbundle file format. The primary difference is that any assets (e.g. images or PDFs) don't use the normal markdown syntax for embedding images, and instead the markup looks like [assets/image1.png]. Aside from that however, the text.txt file is plain markdown (or bear's polar markup if you have markdown compatibility mode turned off), and all images/attachments are in the assets directory of the zip file.