Yesterday, I wrote about troubleshooting OneDrive for Business. What I didn’t write about though was the problems that a simple repair to OneDrive for Business (acting on advice to resolve some sync issues on my client) caused for me…
The OneDrive for Business repair operation works as follows:
- Disconnects all libraries that were experiencing sync problems.
- Reconnects these libraries. This means Repair downloads and syncs the current server version of each library, as if you were syncing for the first time.
- Creates an archive copy of any file that had unsynced changes and places these files in a library folder under C:\users\username\OneDrive for Business archives\.
So, if you are using that full 1TB of storage… you’d better have a good network connection to pull the entire contents of the library from the cloud (which is why the next version of the OneDrive client has selective sync).
In my case, I’m only using a few GB but, because I moved my entire Documents folder to OneDrive a few months ago, my OneNote notebooks were part of the data that was pulled down from the cloud.
I rely heavily on OneNote – I stopped using paper notebooks when I left my last job, as my everyday device is a Surface Pro 3 (which I find ideally suited to note-taking) – and here’s the lesson I learned:
OneNote and OneDrive for Business do not (always) play together nicely.
It should work – there’s even Microsoft advice for moving a OneNote notebook to OneDrive (and the same process works for OneDrive for Business) but it seems the mistake I made was to move all of my files in Windows Explorer. Whilst researching this blog post I’ve found Microsoft’s OneNote syncing best practices (KB2819334) and what I should have done is move the OneNote notebooks from within OneNote…
After the OneDrive for Business repair, I was left with a .ms-one-stub file which Explorer reported as being 1KB in size. 6 months of notes had disappeared – and opening OneNote didn’t follow the stub and magically pick up my notes. I felt physically sick. I thought I had two copies – one on the PC and one in OneDrive for Business. But no, OneDrive for Business was my backup – and it had “eaten” my work.
Luckily, there was another backup copy. It wasn’t current, but it was only a couple of days out of date, rather than starting from scratch. I found that OneNote stores a copy of notes in C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\15.0\Backup.
That location has a folder for each notebook. Each folder contains a OneDrive recycle bin (OneNote_RecycleBin) and copies of my .one files for each section, with a date when the backup was taken – for example project.one (On 22-11-2015).one. I’m not sure when the backup is taken (I’ve made changes to sections today that are still not reflected in the OneNote backup, but losing a couple of days is vastly superior to losing 6 months.
Even with the new information about the correct way to sync OneNote to OneDrive for Business, I’m not sure I completely trust it. From now on I’ll be making a third copy to another location…
OneDrive has put me in similar circumstances after eating two years of college class notes. It happened like this.
1) Notes created locally, one notebook (.one file) per semester
2) Notes lay dormant for numerous years, copied from device to device by bulk copy/paste from backups using Windows Explorer. I expect the .one files survived this just fine.
3) Notes recently migrated from local storage to OneDrive
4) OneDrive repaired once or twice to resolve sync issues
5) OneDrive “ate” the files at some point along the way. They were removed from the file hierarchy all unawares to me. I don’t access these files regularly.
6) Files discovered to be missing. local/MS/OneNote/ does not contain a backup as these files were never opened on this computer. My physical backup (an external drive) does not contain a copy either. That backup is a periodic mirror of what’s on OneDrive. They are truly gone.
Is this consistent with your experience? Any recommendations?