Lost notes in one note

Anonymous
2021-05-18T08:46:16+00:00

I have lost all the notes on one of my pages. I have been adding on to it gradually and saw that all additions were synced timely. When I go back to add to it, I see that all my notes have gone.

There is nothing in deleted notes or in recycle bin of my one drive account. Please, guide me as to how I can recover it.

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneNote | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2021-05-18T10:34:59+00:00

Hi Ishita Ganeriwala,

I go through the post carefully, as for the issue, here are some suggestions:

  1. Please login in OneDrive for the web at www.onenote.com and open your notes from here, check if you can see your notes here.
  2. If you can see the page but not see notes in it, you may check page versions from OneNote for the web to check if someone delete some contents in the notes, right click pages>Select Show versions and you can see version history of the page, you may also restore your notes from the history.
  3. For more information: Find my lost notes - Office Support (microsoft.com)

If suggestions above doesn’t help, could you please share information below with us for further troubleshooting?

  1. Do you edit notes from OneNote for the web or OneNote for Mac app? if it is OneNote for Mac, which version do you use? you may check version from OneNote>About OneNote.
  2. Did you changed anything before the issue?
  3. Did you share the notebook with others?
  4. Does the issue happen on all your notebooks or specific one?
  5. Only notes in pages disappear or you cannot find the page at all?
  6. May I know which Office subscription do you purchased? Office 365 Personal/Family or Office 365 for business(license is assigned by your Office 365 admin)

Regards,

Clark

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Anonymous
2021-05-19T07:38:27+00:00

Hi all,

As this thread has a lot of posts, to make sure you get the most updated information. We will mark this reply as an answer and stick to the top. 

Any further updates on this issue will be posted in this reply. So make sure you've subscribed this thread to get the latest information. 

For now, we have reported this issue internally to the related resources, and they are actively working on it. 

If you did not lose an entire OneNote page, just some of the content in it.  Please refer to Clark’s suggestion use the Page Version to retrieve as much data as you can as a temporary workaround.

Also, if you are the administrator and have already issue a support ticket in the admin center. Please reply to this post and we will need to collect your support ticket number to track the progress.

Appreciate for your understanding and patience.

Regards,

Alex Chen

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Anonymous
2021-05-22T01:16:01+00:00

This is Eric from the OneNote team, wanting to make sure folks are aware that the OneNote engineering team has acknowledged this issue and is actively investigating. We are working to get to the root of the issue.

We sincerely apologize for the pain and inconvenience this is causing and are working hard on a fix to apply as soon as possible.

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  1. Anonymous
    2021-05-21T19:03:09+00:00

    *** I have an update for all who are interested ***

    As has become clear, Microsoft seems to be sweeping this under the rug, so I would not be surprised if no other updates are given to this forum. However, I'll give an update based on what I was told.

    I'll go ahead and tell my story. I had an open note final exam the next day and I realized some critical notes were gone. I posted to this forum and then contacted my university's IT support. Fortunately, my school's IT is very competent and raised an urgent ticket with Microsoft. Somebody from Microsoft support called me within a few minutes and tried to guide me through the "fixes" that were provided on this forum (which obviously do not work). He also thought they may have been somehow deleted, so he tried to check a "second level" recycling bin only available to them and did not find my notes. I was told they were going to investigate further, but I should not expect an update for at least a day. Unfortunately, I was forced to take my exam without access to these very important notes.

    Fast forward to today, I set up a Teams meeting with a Microsoft Premier Support Engineer. I called in, shared my screen, and he once again tried to see if I could find my notes on my end (it's pretty clear at this point that none of us can find our notes). We talked for a while and he said that it seems that our notes were not stored to their servers correctly since my data does not appear on his end either. I pressed him further to see if they could retrieve my missing data. He said that given the fact the data did not actually store to their servers, it seems like the data is likely permanently gone and will probably not be able to be retrieved since, again, it was never encoded/backed up onto their servers in the first place. I asked if there is anything else they could possibly do (like bring this to the attention of another level of engineer), and he responded that the only other option available to him is to submit an internal "request for review" for my case to see if any other solutions could be found. Obviously, I asked him to go ahead and do that. I also asked if Microsoft had at least told other customers about what is going on, and he said that because this seems to have only affected a "small number" of users, as of now, they are not planning on going public with this issue since the issue is "not happening anymore." In other words, people no longer seem to be losing their notes, they think this didn't affect that many people, and therefore, in their eyes, the issue is "resolved" and there is no need to announce anything.

    I know I suggested this before, but now it seems more clear that this needs to be brought to people's attention as well as be put on Microsoft's radar (in case it somehow isn't already). I would suggest if you have not contacted Microsoft support with an urgent ticket through your business/school's IT or admin account, you should do so immediately as I did. Also, if anybody's business or organization has any way of spreading this through social media or the ability to make some type of announcement to a large following, I think that would be very effective at putting more pressure on Microsoft to try to find lost data or at least force them to publicly acknowledge this issue.

    Sorry I couldn't get anymore info besides this. Hope this helps all who were looking for an update and I wish I didn't have to be the bearer of bad news.

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  2. Anonymous
    2021-05-18T11:00:47+00:00

    No - our problem is that pages have gone entirely, so we cannot use the "show version" function. These pages were synced yesterday as this is a shared OneNote file and we were seeing the same data yesterday evening.  Overnight we have effectively "lost" entire pages - not ALL pages in the OneNote Notebook, just those we worked on most recently (i.e. Monday this week).  We have checked the online version of OneNote as well as the PC App versions we mainly use.

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