Hello,
as some of you will know, in August Debian testing started the switching from KDE4 to KDE5. During the transition, KNotes became unusable for a period (the plasmoid was giving an error) and when the update to KDE5 was complete the note I had on my desktop wasn't there anymore. I recreated a new one, but the text on the old one (some of which was only in there...) was nowhere to be found.
Fortunately, I have a backup of my home folder taken before the problem appeared. Searching on the internet, I found that KNotes notes are saved in a .ics file in the ~/.kde/share/apps/ directory. I went to look for it, but there was no .ics file (point of fact, there was no knotes parent folder). Even now, despite the fact that I have a knotes note on the desktop, there is no knotes folder in the current ~/.kde/share/apps/ path.
My question is then: is the old note text still somewhere? And if so, where? I really need to retrieve some of it.

Thanks,
Iacopo

iacchi wrote:Searching on the internet, I found that KNotes notes are saved in a .ics file in the ~/.kde/share/apps/ directory. I went to look for it, but there was no .ics file (point of fact, there was no knotes parent folder).

KNotes only stored its notes in ~/.kde/share/apps/knotes/notes.ics in versions up to 4.12.
With 4.13 KNotes has been ported to use Akonadi, and stores its notes in ~/.local/share/notes/ (or some subfolder thereof) by default, but this can be configured to be wherever you want.

Even now, despite the fact that I have a knotes note on the desktop, there is no knotes folder in the current ~/.kde/share/apps/ path.
My question is then: is the old note text still somewhere? And if so, where? I really need to retrieve some of it.

The notes on the desktop are completely unrelated to KNotes.

Those are stored in the plasmoid configuration in KDE4, in ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc.

Plasma5 stores them separately in ~/.local/share/plasma_notes/ (a single file per note).

PS: instead of ~/.kde/, your distro might also use ~/.kde4/. openSUSE does, I have no idea about Debian...

Thank you very much for the answer, I found them! (phew). Honestly, I thought that the plasmoid was related to KNotes, as the icon is basically the same. Anyway, all's well what ends well. Thanks again.

In Debian 9, notes are in ~/.local/share/notes/.