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

Anonymous

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?

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Answer accepted by question author

Anonymous

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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46 additional answers

Anonymous

2022-05-25T07:57:42+00:00

I have been quitting OneNote every day and restarting it for the past few weeks waiting to see if backup appears in Preferences in my 16.61 Mac version. To my pleasant surprise it appeared today for no apparent reason.

My previous Export backup was about 4GB and this is 578MB and takes about a minute to backup. Each .one file is about one eighth the size; I hope it is all there. Backup can now be done automatically which saves me time. It looks as if backups are opened using File/Open Backups and it looks as if each .one file is date stamped but I am not sure what the cycle is. It looks like an excellent solution but it was a pity it was spoilt by a staggered rollout.
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Anonymous

2022-05-25T04:52:55+00:00

Yup! It's finally here! Now I can sleep peacefully
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