Moving OneNote Notebooks Or How I Came to Understand How OneNote Stores Its Data

I have been using OneNote for quite some time and have built up many notes.  I have been doing this across multiple computers.  I have also been using DropBox to sychronize my work files across multiple computers.  When I began using OneNote, all notebooks were created without regard to DropBox.  Subsequently, OneNote's data location was not taking advantage of DropBox's synchronization abilities.

This brings the following task.  How do I ensure that DropBox has all my current notes and that there are no orphaned notes lingering on my harddrive.  Using SaveAs in OneNote to save a notebook will save the OneNote data required to maintain any Notebook structure (Notebooks which contain Sections which contain Pages) but will leave a copy of the data in its previous location.  Now all future updates to the Notebook will affect only the copy in the new location.  The copy in the previous location will just take up space.

The way I address this is to use Windows Explorer to move one Notebook at a time.  That is, I move the files necessary for that Notebook while that Notebook is closed in OneNote.

1. With OneNote open, open the Notebook in question.
2. Switch to the file tab.
3. Locate the Notebook's location on your hard drive.  In this example the Notebook is at C:\Users\Jaime\Dropbox\Professional\To Do.
4. Close the Notebook.  It is not necessary to close OneNote.
5. Use Windows Explorer to copy the folder entitled To Do which currently resides atC:\Users\Jaime\Dropbox\Professional\ to its new location.
6. Clean the source and the destination folders of any unwanted files. * - See note below.
7. In the file tab of OneNote you can use Open to browse to the Notebook's new location.  You will need to find the *.onetoc2 file which resides in the folder in question.

To understand why this works, realize the relationship between Notebooks->Sections->Pages to Folders->Files->(file internals).  I.e. each Notebook is the folder of the same name, each Section is a file within said folder.  The names of these files are the names of the sections and are of the form *.one.  Pages have no counterpart in the filesystem, but are apparently the internals of the *.one files.

* - If you have been using OneNote for a few months you might have inadvertently made a mess.  Since OneNote uses the filesystem for storing its data, it may be the case that you have stored other files in the folder of a OneNote Notebook!  Now, when you want to move the OneNote Notebook you have inadvertently moved your files that you may actually want where you put them.  This means that you will need to remove the files from the OneNote Notebook folder at the destination since they are not necessary for the Notebook and you will need to remove any OneNote toc files ending of the form *.onetoc2 in the source.