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Is it possible to export old clippings after the MyClippings.Txt file has been deleted? I delete it because keeping every note I've ever saved would be messy.

A few months ago docs on my computer became corrupt. I couldn't repair them -- and I had already deleted the MyClippings.txt on my kindle. However, when opening a book on my Kindle -- I noticed that I could still see everything I had saved. However, browsing each book and manually inputting everything on my computer would take way too much time.

Is there a way to "re-export" the clippings I previously made? They're obviously still "there" on my Kindle Voyage -- but I just don't know how to re-export them.

Thanks for your time!

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Another answer suggests they are available on a web interface, but only if they are books sourced from Amazon (and that you keep it connected to the internet).

If neither of these cases apply to you I may have serendipitously made a starter of a solution to the issue; on my Kindle Paperwhite there's a file under /Kindle/system/userannotlogsDir/ titled annotation_<Unix_Epoch_timestamp>, which I assume is used to determine where the shading for your highlights shows up (I don't know if this file sticks around on Kindles that get connected to wifi). If you download this to your computer, I wrote a perl script to format it as a proper .jsonl file.

From there, contentReference.guid is a permutation of the book title, and position.begin & position.end define the start and end of a highlight by the number of characters (might be bytes) in the ebook file, you may be able to find where your highlights were from there.
Another bash script to generate a spreadsheet of byte lengths of may help to find the exact location of the quotes by dividing by the total length, but it's not always 1:1 with the Kindle's percentage calculation (I suspect images embedded in the files may be the culprit).

Hopefully that's enough to get you started! Sorry it's not as simple as a toggle in the main menu.

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  • Thanks for your answer! I'm in China -- so the Amazon cloud services don't really work here. I looked on their web interface but found nothing. When I get a bit of time I'll definitely try your solution and get back to you! Thanks!
    – whr2206
    Dec 8, 2018 at 14:35
  • If you've kept it in airplane mode the logs should persist. I updated my response with another script that may help recreate them; if you poke around the repository there's also one to backup My Clippings.txt if you insist on continuing to delete it from your device. I wish you the best of luck!
    – Kyle Chesney
    Dec 11, 2018 at 22:43

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