If you’re like me, you probably have a couple Sticky Notes sitting on your desktop with important tasks that need to be done. However, if you’re also like me, you probably have a couple of computers that you use on a regular basis. So, the problem comes in when you want to transfer your Sticky Notes data from one PC to another. Of course, you could always just transcribe them over, that could work, but I’m lazy and want to find a way to automate the process. Thus, I started a quest to find the file where Windows 7 stores Sticky Notes.
Any quest in the computer world begins by IDA’ing the file (what I call disassembling a file in IDA Pro). This brings up of course a consortium of lines of random (not so random) assembly code/language to divulge through. If you know what you’re looking for (as I did), it may not take too horribly long to get through the lines, especially with the ‘Find’ feature. After a bit of searching, I ended up finding the Holy Grail of Sticky Notes:
The file that is circles in red is what we are looking for here. Doing a search in My Computer (you could also find the address using IDA Pro, but that would have taken longer), you will find that the file ‘StickyNotes.snt’ resides in the “username\AppData\roaming\Microsoft\Sticky Notes\” folder. It will/should be the only file that is visible. Now that we found the file where Windows 7 stores the Sticky Notes information, we need to sync it.
Personally, I use, and recommend, Windows Live Sync for most of my syncing activities. However, any sync program would probably work. With WLS, I simply opened it up, clicked ‘sync a folder,’ navigated my way to the folder location, selected the folder, and voila, I now have synced Sticky Notes on my laptop and desktop (or whatever PC I so choose to sync it with).
Now, the real problem lies with merging the files. I don’t think Windows will easily merge two SNT files, although I could be wrong. I basically started with my desktop that had the default Sticky Notes and then Live Sync copied the file over to my laptop. If I had Sticky Notes already on my laptop, I’m not too sure how that would fare. Once the syncing occurs though, Live Sync should have no problem from that point on.
WinQuire 