Just moved to newer MINT machine, had everything on USB to transfer.
EXCEPT,, my desktop notes, from XFce-notes-plugin.

I've heard, "its not in a file"
Well duh ! where you 'spose it is ?

The old corpse will not boot, but I can see all the files.
But, if its not in a file,
I'll miss all the relative birthdays, doctors, IRS, etc, etc.

I may be in trouble

The above quote is from this site.
I believe the file is not written till the user session ends. I wrote some notes and the file ~/.local/share/notes/Notes was empty, upon a reboot the Notes app was open on the desktop and the notes were written to the file --> ~/.local/share/notes/Notes

1 members found this post helpful.

You are correct for much-much newer'note-takers'.

Your post pointed me to $HOME/.local/share,
which contains 1-file-per-note named "text"XYZ123",
plus another "settings"XYZ123" containing the desktop display settings.

As my memory tells,,, there was a DOS/Novell system that stored engineering docs by that same scheme.
The keynote being all info is random,,, organized only for presentation.

So, I simply renamed each XYZ123 file to its short "subject".txt.
Now I can add "subject".jpg, and "subject".doc, etc, etc..
Any file-manager program can replace the old note-taker.

Many thanks for your input