
The change is made to the cache to be synced later. Imagine this: You are changing a note in a OneNote section on one device that has no internet connection. It gets worse when it comes to concurrent edits by different users on a shared notebook or by yourself using different devices (Windows devices of course, as mentioned, other OneNote clients can’t handle files and Dropbox or other storage providers at all). So every change in a note, not matter how small, can lead to big data transfers using a lot of bandwidth, because your files in the Dropbox (or Google Drive or Box) folder are constantly syncing. Yes, Dropbox is able to split up files into blocks to not upload the complete file, but the principle remains. ONE file containing the complete section changes and gets replaced by the Dropbox client. So this means: Every single time you do a tiny edit in a note (type a character), the. The fact that OneNote does not actually load these files in the client but works with a local cache copy, shall be mentioned here but is not that important in this case. Newly added files get uploaded, deleted files removed and altered files get replaced.Īs you might know, OneNote organizes its data like this: Notebooks are folders, section groups are subfolders, sections are proprietary files (based on XML but binary coded) with a. If that happens, the change is more or less immediately synchronized to the cloud providers server.
#SYNCING ONENOTE FOR MAC DROPBOX WINDOWS#
Let me try to explain.Īll cloud storage services with a Windows client and local sync folder (even OneDrive!) are working similar: A local folder (or set of folders) is constantly monitored for changes like new, deleted or modified files. Some issues are more “subtle” like heavy traffic to your Dropbox. Sometimes the resulting problems are very obvious like the creation of additional copies of a section. But although this seems to work at first look, there are some serious flaws to this.Įasy: Just point the local storage folder of OneNote 2016 to your Dropbox folder and it should sync. That way all your notes are saved locally and synchronized to the cloud service of your choice. So you could simply choose the local sync folder from Dropbox, Box or Google Drive.
#SYNCING ONENOTE FOR MAC DROPBOX WINDOWS 10#
At least if you are using the Office version of OneNote 2010, 2013, 2016 (all others like OneNote for MacOS, Android or IOS, even the Windows 10 app, won’t allow you this). Yes, it is possible to store local notebooks in any folder you like. So it should be no problem to store your OneNote notebooks on one of those, right? Wrong!

Not a good idea.Īt first glance, OneDrive seems to be a cloud storage service like many others, Google Drive or Dropbox for example.

If you do not want to store your OneNote notebooks on OneDrive but use Dropbox, Google Drive, Box or a similar cloud storage service instead you might attempt to save your OneNote files in the corresponding local sync folder.
