Will someone who understands how OneNote manages files within Windows and within OneDrive file structures please review what follows and make appropriate corrections? Information below is my guesswork from poking around and is bound to contain errors. There are many questions in this forum that seek this information, but I have not found any answers dated within the last few years.
.Adapted from Going Paperless? Legal Guidelines for Electronic Retention of Documents & Evidentiary Considerations, co-presented by Tiffani L. McDonough and Michael Fagan for the Liberty Bell Chapter of ARMA International (April 2014) and Archive Systems (May 2014).
OneNote keeps a separate file for each OneNote Section using the extension .one. By default, copies on Windows and on OneDrive are kept synchronized by OneNote.
Locally, the Windows files are stored in a folder named after the OneNote Notebook that contains those sections. The default location of that file is C:Users<username>AppDataLocalMicrosoftOneNote16Backup<NotebookName>Sectionname+datestamp>.one
On OneDrive, copies of the OneNote Section files cannot be found by browsing OneDrive because they have complex web addresses that don't show up under the user's OneDrive file structure. (One way to find the OneNote Section files in OneDrive on the web is to make a change locally within the section you're looking for, then synchronize the notebook, then browse to the OneDrive 'recent' link. The web location of the OneNote Section file you're looking for should be at or near the top of the list.)
I haven't found a way to control what notebooks are kept locally. After a while a user may not want to keep local copies of old OneNote Notebooks, but he may want to keep archival copies on OneDrive.
Beware of the following possible sources of confusion:
- The current local OneNote Section files are referred to in three different ways by OneNote, by OneNote options, and by Windows. As explained above, OneNote creates a Windows file for each OneNote Section and puts it in a folder named for the OneNote Notebook.
- However, in the Windows file structure, that local OneNote Notebook folder is under what is called a 'Backup' folder (see default location above). But these are not backups. These are the current local copies of the OneNote Section files of the OneNote Notebook folders. Deleting them will remove them from the local system and from OneDrive.
- Under the OneNote options for 'Save & Backup' this inappropriately named 'Backup' folder is called the 'Cache file location.'
- If you ask OneDrive to change the location of a OneNote Notebook to a location on your local OneDrive, it merely puts a web link in the specified destination folder. This web link will be useless if you are offline.