I am a big fan of the Bear app; I switched from Notion to Bear for its simplicity, performance, and OCR capabilities with images and PDFs. Today, while I was browsing notes, I accidentally hit a backspace and cleared an image, to my surprise, I was unable to retrieve it.

Luckily, it wasn’t a crucial note, but if it had been, I would have been in trouble. I browsed through Reddit to see if there were any workarounds, and to my surprise, there weren’t any good workarounds. Even with iCloud sync, you don’t have a way to recall an old note.

This thread in reddit pretty much summarise the setup https://www.reddit.com/r/bearapp/comments/15ls0bz/how_to_automate_backup_for_bearapp_on_mac/

Step 1: Setup a shortcut to call Bear’s Backup

I’ve set up a shortcut called “DailyBearBackup”. The shortcut calls for a Backup in the Bear app and outputs it to a folder. The backups are named based on the date and time of the backup.

Step 2: Create an application using Automator to call the shortcut

on run {input, parameters}	do shell script "shortcuts run DailyBearBackup"	return inputend run

Save the file to Application folder. I called it BearBackup

Step 3: Call the Application through Task Till Dawn for automated backups

Task Till Dawn is a free app that allows you to run this on autopilot. Task Till Dawn will call the application we created above on a given interval in the background.

Download Task Till Dawn from here

Once installed, create a new task. It took some time to figure out the proper sequence for this one. When creating a task, first add an action called “Specify files and folders” (select and double-click).

Then, add “Open Application” action.

Finally, set the schedule you want, save and close.

Bonus step: Deleting old backup files

This method will create a backup file each day. With attachments, the size of each backup will grow, so it makes sense to delete older backups. For this, I am using Hazel. Hazel is a paid app, and I was already using it to clean up my Downloads folder. If you are a user of Hazel, below are the settings I use.

Simple set up with Shortey

If you are up for trading technical complexity for money, the Shortey app can bypass Steps 2 & 3. The paid app ($20/year at the time of writing) allows the scheduling of shortcuts.