OneNote - All Notebooks Suddenly Empty

Anonymous
2016-08-17T14:34:44+00:00

My world heavily linked into this application and nine notebooks were suddenly emptied off all their content - right in front of my eyes.  All I did was start it up, and was about to type when it all just went away and I got this message:

"There are no sections open in this notebook or section group

Click here to create a new section**"**

Now I did go to backup - but it's not restoring my notebooks the way they were.

These books are also located in OneDrive, but I can't bring them in.

I would like to know why this happened.

It appears that Microsoft OneNote is unstable and nobody has any real answers.

This concerns Office 2010.

Can someone please help.

***Post moved by the moderator to the appropriate forum category.***

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneNote | For home | Windows

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous
2016-08-22T22:40:10+00:00

Hi everyone - some update.

I believe this issue was resolved last Friday, 08/19. Please check Denise's answer here, and let us know if it is fixed with your latest update. To get the update immediately, open OneNote and click  File> Account > Update Options > Update Now.  

If you're curious to learn more on the issue, check out this postmade by OneNote Program Manager Grant in the Reddit community.

If you're not seeing the fix, do respond and let us know.

Best,

Noyonima

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-06-02T13:55:53+00:00

    It started happening on May 29th on my work machine (Office 2010), no sync issues at home (Office 2016) or using my Android smartphone.

    Notebooks disappear and re-appear randomly when synchronization is triggered. I used Onenote 2010 for years at work set as "Sync automatically whenever there are changes", but since 29/5 I had to set it to "Work offline - Sync only when I click Sync All" to avoid to re-download completely the notebooks every N minutes.

    I have tried to:

    • Clear the local cache
    • Close and re-open my Onenote notebooks
    • Repair the local cache with /forcerepair (repairing a copy of the cache, no differences at the end of the repair)
    • Check if WebClient service is enabled (it's up&running)

    No luck, so far, this sync issue keeps affecting my Onenote 2010.

    I noticed some things that:

    1. When the sync "fails" and the notebook "disappears", the corresponding .onesrvcache becomes "blank" (=12 bytes instead of some KB)
    2. Analyzing the HTTP(s) traffic with Fiddler, I discovered that sometimes the calls to Onenote services (e.g.  https://docs.live.net/SkyDocsService.svc) fails with HTTP 1.1 / 403 Forbidden. Those errors and the disappearing of the notebooks seem related, but it happens intermittently.

    Closing and re-opening Onenote before attempting a new synchronization usually helps, but now always. 

    Note: months ago I enabled 2 factor authentication on my Outlook account, but I never had issues with Onenote. 

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-06-02T12:44:58+00:00

    This old problem has started happening again. After all notebooks suddenly disappearing, I would have to wait an hour for them all to download again and resync. When it happened twice in a row in the same day, I said enough was enough, and turn off auto-sync. Haven't had a problem since, but I'm afraid to manually sync, expecting the same thing to happen again.

    This old problem has started happening again. After all notebooks suddenly disappearing, I would have to wait an hour for them all to download again and resync. When it happened twice in a row in the same day, I said enough was enough, and turn off auto-sync. Haven't had a problem since, but I'm afraid to manually sync, expecting the same thing to happen again.

    Yes, this happens AGAIN!

    Can someone pls help?

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-06-02T08:56:57+00:00

    This old problem has started to happen again. After all of notebooks suddenly disappeared, I would have to wait an hour for them all to download again and resync. When it happened twice in a row in the same day, I said enough was enough, and turn off auto-sync. Haven't had a problem since, but I'm afraid to manually sync, expecting the same thing to happen again.

    Edit: when I try to manually sync, all notebooks now show "not connected."

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-06-02T05:45:15+00:00

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