OneNote does not sync

Thanks Bart, glad to hear it worked for you. Unfortunately for me, this is the current situation:

 - On the web - Notes have reappeared, even sections that had disappeared during my attempt to move sections one-by-one to alternate notebooks, trying to get the original one to sync

 - My desktop Office 2013 client, currently in manual syncing mode - Refuses to sync anything anymore, even OneNotes stored in network shared folders which was working till yesterday. Clicking on "Sync Now" results in "Not syncing." and the error icon in a few seconds, no more detailed error messages. [I'm online and logged in, I can see the OneNote in browser (OneDrive) and the other one in Windows Explorer (shared folder)]

 - iOS client: Stuck at "Syncing" for my OneDrive OneNote, reporting last sync time as "Never"

Looking at older threads (like this one: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office\_365hp-onenote/my-onenote-desktop-version-is-not-syncing-however/935106e0-b8a0-4e30-b432-c9ce6aa26b08), the typical suggestion in this case is to close notebooks and reopen them, or to clear the OneNote cache (which also closes the notebook). I'm really worried about closing and reopening the notebook in the desktop client, lest I lose more local changes.

Moreover, I would still do so, assuming the problem was limited to the OneDrive notebooks, were it not for the fact that the notebook stored on the network shared folder is not syncing as well. Any suggestions?

Thanks

--Kartik

Bart,

I am still confused about "restoring files" and how that is different in business. Onenote does two things: it creates backups (even double and triple if selected) to the local drive (under the "users" directory). It also creates up-to-the-minute saves in case of the program crashing (all MS products do this). This is what I dub the "cache". This is what I believe you mean by reverting to the "last edits". 

Does Business version save the "last edits"? If not, I can see no advantage to paying 5$/month or the 10$/m for the full service in down-time server issue such as this.

thanks again,

Hi Shawn,

Regarding my situation: I am using both versions of OneDrive: Business and Personal. The files that were impacted are all (still) on the personal OneDrive. My first contacts with MSFT helpdesk (phone) were with business support. When they found out that files were on personal version, they referred me to their colleagues from public OneDrive support (chat).

Phone support is more powerful, so that is one of the reasons it is good to have the files on OneDrive for business. There may be other reasons as well. 

Note: one reason *not* to put OneNote files on a business drive, is (was?) that people with a free Microsoft account on a Mac could not access the file on a business drive. That is why I moved them to my personal drive. Don't know if that is still the case.

Re restoring files from business and personal versions. I'm quite sure that it will work on the business version. One person indicated that it would be possible also for the free version, but I can not confirm that. We never got that far when it was needed (yesterday) and today the sync process "came back to live" so the question was no longer on the table.

Re the local version in my cache: I recovered that only on my iPad. On my PC I had closed my local version too early to do this.

Does this answer your questions?

Anybody still having these errors with error message 0xE4020017?

Bart

Bart, I thought you mentioned you had the business version, yet it also had this syncing problem?

If so, how does the ability to restore to a previous version in the Business version differ from using the local desktop backup of Onenote? Are you referring to last edits (the cache version on the desktop)?

thanks for your work,

I feel happy to login and find everything back to normal. What a relief. I see everyone else's is working again too. That's great. I did some more research into OneNote and the news to see if perhaps they would announce the bug and give an estimated time when it would be fixed, or at least confirmation it was being acknowledged and worked on. 

What I found instead was, OneNote made some major changes to their services to improve them and make them better. (This could have been the result of that) And Evernote recently announced a major increase to their membership fees and as a result everyone is jumping ship and coming to OneNote by the hundreds, probably thousands as I type this. 

Who knows what happened. I just feel grateful it is now working again for everyone, and as a result of this, we have all learned better ways to back up our data in the event something crazy like this happens again. I also feel grateful no one lost any saved data in their archives.