One place for everything in your life. Easily store and share photos, videos, documents, and more - anywhere, on any device, free. To move a notebook to OneDrive if you originally created the notebook on your computer, do the following: In OneNote 2016 or OneNote 2013, open the notebook that you want to share on OneDrive. Select File Share. Select a location for your notebook, or select Add a Place, and then sign into your. Change Language. Privacy & Cookies Legal Trademarks © 2021 Microsoft.com Legal Trademarks © 2021 Microsoft.com. Create your best work with the latest versions of Word, Excel, and other Office apps. Plus, get 1 TB of cloud storage, document sharing, ransomware recovery, and more with OneDrive. Login to OneDrive with your Microsoft or Office 365 account.
To get the most power out of OneNote you want to be able to synchronise the contents of your notebooks between devices and possibly share them with other people.
Cloud based save, sync or sharing is a standard requirement for most software these days and OneNote is no exception by offering such a feature.
However, due to the smart way that OneNote handles synchronisation and coupled with the fact that it’s generally called OneDrive sync – OneDrive of course being Microsoft’s cloud storage platform – confusion can ensue when people start to migrate to using OneDrive for notebook sync.
What they tend to do is copy their notebooks from wherever they used to store them and then paste them into their OneDrive folder. This seems pretty sensible because it’s called OneDrive sync, so we just put the files into OneDrive, right?
Logical, yes. Correct, no.
Another common confusion is that within OneNote a user might create a new notebook ‘on OneDrive’ – this is the default option when creating new notebooks with OneNote – but when they come to browse their OneDrive folder to find the notebook, say they want to back it up or make a copy, they can’t find it.
Onenote Onedrive Ipad
Right here is the point where it can get slightly confusing and this is what I’d like to address with this article.
To be clear, the two confusions are:
- a notebook that is demonstrably ‘on OneDrive’ remains invisible when access is attempted using the OneNote app
- a notebook that was created by OneNote to be stored on your OneDrive cannot be found, instead there’s a strange file that’s only 1KB is size and it most definitely is not a OneNote notebook
Why is this?
There is a lot of magic going on behind the scenes when OneNote & OneDrive are syncing your changes between machines.
Normally, cloud sync services like OneDrive or Dropbox copy the newest version of the file up to the cloud and then send it out to all the other devices logged in to that account.
When OneNote does its native ‘OneDrive sync’ it actually only sends the changes up to the cloud which subsequently then sends these changes out to the other devices.
The important thing is that you have a full copy of the notebook on your local machine and it’s only the changes that are being synced.
That is to say the file isn’t actually on OneDrive as a file that you can open. You have the notebook stored on your machine (tucked away somewhere) and it just happens that it’s on the OneDrive servers where this special OneNote-only synchronisation occurs, hence the confusion.
The placeholder that sits within your OneDrive with the same name as the notebook is just a shortcut to the web-only OneNote view. If you open the file with a text editor you can see the contents:
Ok, so what does this all mean?
If you want to share your notebook between devices and/or other people then you need to use the OneNote program itself to plumb in the syncing. It needs to create or move the notebook and then tell OneDrive that you’re now using OneNote syncing, hiding the notebook and then leaving that shortcut placeholder.
What I actually want is a physical copy of my notebook so I can back it up
You can get that and still use OneDrive syncing. Under Options > Save & Backup you can tell OneNote to automatically place backups in a location that you dictate on schedule between once a minute and once every 6 weeks. Confusingly you could even set that backup folder to be on OneDrive where it would then sync the actual .one OneNote file(s) between your machines as you would expect.
But I really don’t want to use OneDrive
Firstly it’s worth noting that to use OneNote syncing to OneDrive you don’t need to install the OneDrive cloud sync software; it’s all built into OneNote.
But that said, if you really want to lose the ability to sync your notebook to mobile devices or if you are prepared to get sync conflicts when you share the notebook old-school using your cloud sync platform, then this is still an option for you.*
When creating a new notebook simply don’t select OneDrive as the location, choose This PC and select where you’d like to store the physical file.
If, however, you are already syncing your notebook via OneDrive then just use the export command. Export the page, section or entire notebook into the OneNote native format and you can put it wherever you want. OneNote will still be able to open it. You just cannot share it very easily (or effectively).
* this is not currently an option for iOS, Android or OSX versions of OneNote, your only option is to use OneDrive syncing.
I definitely want to start syncing using OneDrive so I can get my notebooks on all devices, how do I make it work?
Assuming you have a .one or .onepkg file created by OneNote you just open it normally; you don’t copy the notebook to OneDrive first.
Then go to File > Share. Select (or login) to your OneDrive and press Move Notebook.
All the magic now happens and you should eventually see the shortcut file in your OneDrive folder.
If you open the OneNote program on your phone or other device, that notebook should now be in the list of notebooks that you have available to open.
Summary
A lot of magic happens under the hood with OneNote syncing. To get it working you simply need to use the OneDrive syncing options within OneNote itself.
If you’d like to delve slightly deeper into how that syncing magic works then check out this blog post by Omar Atay, who works on the OneNote team and is the developer of Onetastic a very popular OneNote add-in.
More like this?
If you found this useful then you might like my OneNote blog as it covers similar topics.
Also, if you’re looking to super-charge your OneNote productivity then I have a book in the works that will help you Get Stuff Done with OneNote.
Almost all existing OneNote versions require your notebooks to be stored in a Microsoft cloud service, namely OneDrive or OneDrive for Business. Is there a way to bypass that restriction?
If you do not want to (or are not allowed to) store your OneNote notebooks in a public cloud service, I have a lot of bad and only one good news for you. Let me start with the good one: The OneNote version for Windows that is installed with MS Office (2010, 2013, 2016) lets you freely choose the storage location for your notebook files. So you can keep them on a local drive or a network share inside your organization. An alternative would be an on-premise Sharepoint server, which also works rather well at least with OneNote 2016 for Windows and OneNote Online (in the browser). You can even share those notes with other users or devices (as long as they run the Office version of OneNote for Windows) if you set the proper access rights to the SharePoint library or network share.
Now for the bad news. All other OneNote versions, so OneNote for MacOS, iOS, Android, Windows 8/10 mobile, OneNote Online and the Windows 10 app, require your notebooks to be stored on a cloud service by Microsoft. This can be OneDrive (personal) or OneDrive for business (aka Sharepoint Online, part of some Office 365 subscriptions). You can’t even switch to another cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive, because those don’t support the protocol needed for a correct note synchronization. More detail about this in this article.
Onenote Onedrive File
So if you are reading this article hoping for a workaround to use any OneNote app without a Microsoft account, an Office 365 subscription and OneDrive, I am sorry to disappoint you. I wrote this mainly to confirm that there is absolutely no way around these prerequisites.
But what about all OneNote apps being able to work offline?
Apparently, you can edit existing notes or add new ones without an active internet connection on any OneNote app and system. So the notes must be stored on the device, right? Yes, they are. But this offline cache is in a special format (binary files, all very split up) and only used by OneNote to temporary work with a copy to synchronize the content with the actual storage location later, when an internet connection is re-established.
Now it could come to your mind to create a notebook on OneDrive (notebooks can’t be created on your device while it is offline), open it on your Mac or iPad, delete the original file from OneDrive using your browser and from then on only work in that cached local copy. Yes, you could do that and the only obvious drawback would be a constant sync error that you could just ignore. But I strongly advise against that method, because that cached copy is rather fragile. Closing a notebook, resetting your OneNote settings or probably an upcoming app update will erase the local cache and delete all your notes without any recovery options.
So the point is: If you want to use OneNote on Mac, iOS, Android, Windows 10 mobile or the Windows 10 UWP app, you have to store your notebooks on OneDrive or OneDrive for Business. Again, sorry if this is bad news.
Why is Microsoft doing this?
Well, if you ask any Microsoft representative, the usual answer is: “Because the cloud is better, safer and more reliable than any local drive”. I consider that half of the truth at best and mostly marketing twaddle. But I am sure that there are two real reasons. One is merely political. In 2014 Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared a change of course and that the future of Microsoft (products) would now lie in “Cloud first, mobile first”. Forcing OneNote users to the Microsoft cloud services is just a consequence of this new directive.
Onenote Onedrive Outlook
The second reason is of a technical nature. Because of the way how OneNote synchronizes data (only updating changes to single objects inside a file instead of the whole file), a special protocol is needed. This is called COBALT or MS-FSHTTP by Microsoft and is only supported by Sharepoint and OneDrive. Even locally stored notebooks (with OneNote for Windows/desktop only) are handled in a way that is close to that COBALT protocol. I bet this could not be easily reproduced on the MacOS or iOS file systems. And given the first reason, it is very unlikely that Microsoft would put any effort in it.
Will Microsoft change their mind?
Onenote Onedrive Restore
Who can say that? And if they will, will they change it in the “right” direction or maybe also remove the option to store notebooks locally from OneNote for Windows. Or completely remove the desktop version of OneNote (with Office 2019?), only leaving the Windows 10 app. But you can still try to add your vote for local storage to come on the Uservoice foums for OneNote for Mac, OneNote for iOS, Android or the Windows 10 app.