Export All Your Apple Voice Memos at Once

2025-12-11

Apple Voice Memos doesn't have an "export all" button. Here's a one-liner to back them all up.

First Time Setup

Grant your Terminal app access to Voice Memos:

Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access
Click the + button
Add your Terminal app (Terminal.app, iTerm.app, etc.)
Restart your terminal completely

You only need to do this once.

Export Your Memos

⚠️ Security Note: Running scripts directly from the internet without reviewing them first is risky. Always review the script before running it, or download it locally first.

Quick command (creates an AllVoiceMemos folder in your current directory):

curl -s https://gist.githubusercontent.com/fabienheureux/94e0599fe675b9b2414391e5bd00b402/raw | bash

Export to a specific folder:

curl -s https://gist.githubusercontent.com/fabienheureux/94e0599fe675b9b2414391e5bd00b402/raw | bash -s -- ~/Desktop/MyMemos

Note: If your path has spaces, wrap it in quotes:

curl -s https://gist.githubusercontent.com/fabienheureux/94e0599fe675b9b2414391e5bd00b402/raw | bash -s -- "/path/with spaces/MyMemos"

Prepend recording date to filenames (creates names like 2024-12-11 Meeting Notes.m4a):

curl -s https://gist.githubusercontent.com/fabienheureux/94e0599fe675b9b2414391e5bd00b402/raw | bash -s -- --prepend-date

Or with a custom folder:

curl -s https://gist.githubusercontent.com/fabienheureux/94e0599fe675b9b2414391e5bd00b402/raw | bash -s -- --prepend-date ~/Desktop/MyMemos

What the script does:

Reads your Voice Memos database
Copies all .m4a files with their proper names
Preserves the original recording dates

See the script →

Automatic Daily Backups

Want to back up your memos automatically every day? Set up a cron job:

# Download the script
curl -o ~/export_voice_memos.sh https://gist.githubusercontent.com/fabienheureux/94e0599fe675b9b2414391e5bd00b402/raw
chmod +x ~/export_voice_memos.sh

# Edit your crontab
crontab -e

Then add this line to run it daily at 2 AM:

0 2 * * * ~/export_voice_memos.sh ~/Documents/VoiceMemosBackup

Or with date prefixes:

0 2 * * * ~/export_voice_memos.sh --prepend-date ~/Documents/VoiceMemosBackup

That’s it!

Gist: export_voice_memos.sh