OneNote - All Notebooks Suddenly Empty

Anonymous

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.***

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

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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56 additional answers

Anonymous

2016-08-18T15:18:46+00:00

I did one additional step.

I opened OneNote on my PC that was not working(Win 7, Office 2010) and closed all notebooks.

Once closed, I followed the steps indicated by going to OneDrive, opening each notbook one at a time online. Then clicking "Edit Notebook with One Note" and allowing each one to fully sync. All seems to be fine, just remember a large notebook can take a while to sync. I watched the status on each by right clicking on the notbook tab to the left, and clicking "notebook sync status..."
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Anonymous

2016-08-18T14:39:08+00:00

I too have the problem and none of the numerous proposed workarounds have worked. However, it occurs to me that since I have no problem opening from my home machine (I"m at work at present) I can move the notebook and/or back it up from there. I can't verify this at present, but has anyone with the problem tried logging on from another computer (e.g. temporarily borrowed) and getting to their OneNote data that way?
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Anonymous

2016-08-18T14:31:20+00:00

As with others, notebooks looked empty, and closing and reopening did not help with the desktop view, while the data was viewable through the onedrive web interface, and going from 2010 to 2016 onenote did not make any difference. On one machine resetting the IE settings (options/advanced/reset) helped although I seldom use IE. (This is a fix for sudden loss of update in Security Essentials that happened a few days earlier)

However, this did work

On the web interface to one drive storage, copy the problem file to another location / directory, and rename (for safety). Opening the copy showed the expected contents. Long term success with this is unknown, but seeing the data reappear was pleasant, to say the least.
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Anonymous

2016-08-18T14:14:47+00:00

This was the only thing that worked for me! Thank you!

No joy for me. I also could not close all notebooks (OneNote 2010 on Win 7 at work) and then load from OneDrive. No problem with the same data on my home PC running 2015. So it appears that the issue is impacting across OS and Office versions.
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