#define private public - Claus Brod on stuff (08 Oct 2017)

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---+++ [[DefinePrivatePublic20171008OneNote][Restoring <nop>OneNote data from the local cache]] (08 Oct 2017)

<summary>
Phew, that was close. I just almost lost two months of notes in <nop>OneNote, but was able to recover them from
local cache files.</summary>

This is how it all started: After withstanding the constant nagging for a while, I finally gave in to those prompts to upgrade to 
Office 2016 on my developer laptop. During the upgrade, <nop>OneNote 2016 warned me that it may lose those few notes which had 
not been synced to the cloud yet. This is because <nop>OneNote 2016 will not use an older installation's local cache, but instead
create a new empty local cache during installation, which will then fill incrementally by downloading notes from the cloud.

I shrugged off the warning because I was quite certain I had not made any significant changes recently, 
so everything should have been synced already. Of course I was totally wrong. 

But after installation, <nop>OneNote 2016 would not display about two months worth of notes even though I had taken them
(in <nop>OneNote 2013) on the very system on which I performed the upgrade. It turned out that <nop>OneNote 2013 had indeed not
synced _any_ of those notes to the cloud - for a period of almost two months.

The bad news is that I will probably never find out why and how synchronisation failed for such a long
time, and why I never noticed any warnings about it. I guess I will be quite paranoid about synchronisation for a while now.

But the good news is that I managed to restore my notes. <nop>OneNote 2016 had created a new and empty local cache below
=%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\OneNote\16.0=, but it had _not_ deleted the old <nop>OneNote 2013 cache (below
=%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\OneNote\15.0=), and this saved my bacon.

Others have fallen into the same or similar traps before, of course, and so there are a number of related
discussions out there on the topic, for example at https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_onenote-mso_other-mso_2010/recover-information-from/8bf30713-316b-49cb-abc3-a8ce8e4b310d. A number of approaches are mentioned, such as:
   * Restore <nop>OneNote sections from the =C:\Users\&lt;name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\15.0\Backup= directory
      * This worked only partially because the latest backup was already several days old.
   * Extract notes from the old =OneNoteOfflineCache.onecache= file in =C:\Users\&lt;name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\15.0\=
     by running =onenote.exe /forcerepair= on it.
      * This would fail because both <nop>OneNote 2013 and <nop>OneNote 2016 would complain that the cache file was
        of a format written by a "future version" of <nop>OneNote. (Which wasn't true, because the local cache file
        was written by <nop>OneNote 2013.
      * See also https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/825779/how-to-recover-information-in-a-damaged-onenote-section-file

The approach which did work in the end was as follows:
   * I installed <nop>OneNote 2013 on a separate Windows VM.
   * Then I copied over the cache files from my developer laptop to the Windows VM, i.e. both the =OneNoteOfflineCache.onecache= file
     and the =OneNoteOfflineCache_Files= directory (which holds all the attachments), overwriting the default
     local cache files of the <nop>OneNote 2013 installation on the VM.
   * After starting <nop>OneNote 2013 on the VM, it displayed all notes just fine. Big sigh of relief.
   * Syncing those notes from the VM to the cloud would not work, though. I first had to move all the notes to a new
     section in the affected notebook, and then wait until all notes had been synced.
   * And now, finally, the notes reappeared in my <nop>OneNote 2016 installation on my developer laptop as well.

I also could have uninstalled <nop>OneNote 2016 on my developer laptop and replaced it with the older <nop>OneNote 2013, and in fact
I tried, but the <nop>OneNote 2013 installer told me to uninstall all of Office 2016 first, from which I shied away.

<!--

TODO: Describe directory structure

C:\Users\brod\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\15.0

C:\Users\brod\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\16.0

TODO: Add screenshots

TODO: Lessons learned

TODO: Add links
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Convert-a-notebook-to-a-different-format-in-OneNote-2016-for-Windows-f78e707b-bf4d-4062-a33e-1844f921148b

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_onenote-mso_other/recover-information-from/8bf30713-316b-49cb-abc3-a8ce8e4b310d?auth=1

TODO: Download link for OneNote 2013


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