URL=!7844&type=3 Ok, so what does this all mean? If you open the file with a text editor you can see the contents: The placeholder that sits within your OneDrive with the same name as the notebook is just a shortcut to the web-only OneNote view. 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.

That is to say the file isn’t actually on OneDrive as a file that you can open. 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. 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.

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. There is a lot of magic going on behind the scenes when OneNote & OneDrive are syncing your changes between machines.

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.a notebook that is demonstrably ‘on OneDrive’ remains invisible when access is attempted using the OneNote app.Right here is the point where it can get slightly confusing and this is what I’d like to address with this article. This seems pretty sensible because it’s called OneDrive sync, so we just put the files into OneDrive, right?Īnother 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.

What they tend to do is copy their notebooks from wherever they used to store them and then paste them into their OneDrive folder. 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. 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.Ĭloud based save, sync or sharing is a standard requirement for most software these days and OneNote is no exception by offering such a feature.

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