Mac OneNote ver. 16.60 "Backups" does NOT show in Preferences

Anonymous
2022-04-15T23:57:37+00:00

PROBLEM

With the release of version 16.60, the Mac OneNote development team stated in the Mac App Store:

...Starting now, your notes on Mac will be automatically backed up on your Mac and not just in the cloud." "...go to OneNote preferences and select Backups. From there, you can customize your backup preferences and access your backed up notes."

The problem is there is no "Backups" section in preferences.

MY ACTIONS

I have uninstalled and reinstalled OneNote multiple times. Rebooted. Signed out and back into my Microsoft account. Nothing I have done has revealed the new Backups section.

I do not know if it makes any difference, but I am a license holder for Microsoft 365 Family edition of which OneNote is a part. I originally downloaded OneNote from the Microsoft site. Today, when I could not find "Backups," I uninstalled OneNote, and re-installed from the Mac App Store; that did not work either.

FOR THE RECORD

I'm a fanatical note-taker, organizational, planner, outliner type of person; OneNote is the best tool I have ever used. I have used OneNote daily since it was first released on Windows. I have gladly moved to Mac and continued to use the Mac version of OneNote. I have also regularly tried other note apps to see if there is anything better. By "better" what I actually mean is if there is another notes app as excellent as OneNote AND allows me to save my data locally. There has only been one contender and it is hardly supported anymore.

QUESTION

Does anybody have a solution?

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneNote | For home | MacOS

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
2022-05-25T13:51:48+00:00

I am glad to report I received the Backups feature.

If you haven't yet received the Backups feature...

I suspect you will receive it in the near future. I wouldn't waste time to determine the cause of delay or to force the feature to appear.

  • April 16th, 2022, I saw in the App Store, the Devs announced the new Backups feature available
  • May 24th, 2022, I received the Backups feature
  • I have no idea why it took that long
  • I tried every tactic I know to force the Backups feature to appear--nothing worked. If it matters to you, look back in these posts and you'll find a post in which I listed everything I tried.

Backups works...

  • The Backups feature works quickly and well
  • I have not yet tried to restore data; I'll report my findings when I try it

Hope for the future...

Assuming the restore feature works properly, then my only hope for future abilities is to allow users their own local destination for backups. As of now, backups are forced to Microsoft's preset location, which is:

/Users/*your user name*/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.onenote.mac/Data/Library/Application Support/Microsoft User Data/OneNote/15.0/Backup

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-05-20T17:11:26+00:00

    Sweet ...be thankful it's finally working 😉

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-05-21T10:02:21+00:00

    I have received the popup today morning... But the feature is not there ... Guess will have to wait and see after few days

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-05-24T05:56:25+00:00

    I finally received my pop-up today as well, and found that the feature started working immediately once I did. I've configured my settings, run and tested the backups, all that good stuff, and can confirm all is now well. It is great to finally have a backup of all my data here and I am truly grateful that the OneNote dev team took the time to port this feature over to Mac.

    HOWEVER, I still find it completely ridiculous that this has been a month-long ongoing saga in which a clearly non-functional feature was announced to the world, with zero documentation anywhere except for in the patch notes, and with even Microsoft employees not knowing what's going on with it. While I know in my heart that we'll never get one, I think the Mac OneNote community really is owed a proper post-mortem by the dev team as to how the hell such an amateurish issue occurred in the first place, let alone going unresolved for several weeks.

    This kind of utter incompetency is why I switched from Windows to Mac in the first place, and while overall I have been genuinely impressed with how well the Office suite performs on MacOS, these occasional reminders of how inept Microsoft can be really solidifies my decision to make the OS switch and never look back.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-05-24T17:29:51+00:00

    Glad all sorted...Totally agree with your comments but seems to be way of the world these days...start by blaming the users rather than looking for answers at home.

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