OneNote 2016 and syncing to NAS

As I mentioned I personally did not come across problems with OneNote and my Linux based NAS by Synology but I can well imagine that BerndP might be right.

There should be no problems (apart from being limited to the Office version of OneNote 2016 and not being able to use OneNote for Mac, iOS, Android or the Win 10 App) to store and access the notes on the NAS. All you need is a network share (preferrably linked to a drive letter) and set OneNotes default storage location to that share in the options (Options - Save and Backup).

Existing notebooks in the cloud can be moved by either creating a new empty notebook on your NAS, opening the one from OneDrive and copying or moving section by section using OneNote or by exporting the existing notebook to a ONEPKG file and loading that one into a new notebook (just double click the ONEPKG in Explorer) and when asked create a new notebook on the NAS to import the ONEPKG content into.

Where the problems that Bernd mentioned (corrupted or misplaced sections) COULD occur is when there are concurrent edits to a notebook/section from different devices and those edits have to be synced and merged from the local caches to the section files on the NAS. But again, I already did this and had no problems by now.

Do you want to use a NAS because you want to access the notebooks from different devices or is it merely about storage space? For notebooks I do not want to be on OneDrive I just store them locally on my work PC and include the storage paths in my backup system (to the NAS).

Regarding using additional MS accounts: Best practice (that will work well with OneNote on non Windows devices too) is to still use just one account for OneNote on all devices but to share all notebooks from the other accounts with edit rights to this "main" account. So you do not have to fumble around with different accounts and logins.

Some additional information why this all is not as easy as it should be:

We are not talking about a simple file synchronisation like Dropbox or Google Drive do. OneNote is capable of having multiple users/devices edit the same "file" (files are actually OneNote sections) at the same time which is not allowed by common file systems (if someone opens a file for edit it is locked for other accesses). In addition OneNote is auto saving whenever a change has been made, may it even be very small.

With that in mind imagine this: You have a large notebook (or section) with lots of pictures, PDFs or attached files. You make a little change to a page within that section (e.g. add a word). The WHOLE section file would have to be uploaded to Dropbox, GDrive or whatever cloud system you are using to update it. Not once, after every small edit! What a waste of bandwith and time (btw. this is exactly what is happening when people force OneNote to use Dropbox by saving the notebook files to the local Dropbox folder). In addition concurrent edits on different devices would lead to sync conflicts on the cloud server as different versions of the files arrive. Usually duplicated (or sometimes corrupt) sections would be the result as the server does not know how to merge different changes to the same file.

In conjunction with OneDrive OneNote is not using a file based sync mechanism but another one called Cobalt. This is also used on Sharepoint and based on splitting the files (in the local cache and on the server) in small chunks which can be individually synced.

Dropbox, GDrive, Owncloud and all other cloud services do not support this protocol, that's why you are limited to OneDrive / OneDrive for Business.

When OneNote files are stored locally (or on a NAS) Cobalt can not be used but Microsoft created a "similar" sync system when OneNote was released 14 years ago that works with the Windows file system. And this protocol is the one BerndP knows to create problems on a Linux based NAS, which -- again -- I  personally can't confirm but I very much tend to believe him :)

 My main problem is OneDrive - with huge notebooks (500 mb and over) i'm going to run into size limitations and its just gonna be a big pain. I thought that there wasn't going to be a way to do this without it, but I was hoping.

There are reasons why OneNote is free on all systems. One of them (at least at some point in the process of finding a business model for OneNote) must have been not only to create OneDrive users but to make them hit the limits and buy more capacity.

So why in the world should Microsoft open a way to avoid OneDrive completely? 

Yes, in the "old days" OneNote has been able to store and share notebooks via local storage or network shares (also on a server or NAS). OneNote 2016 for Windows (the version that comes with MS Office, not the free version) still has this ability; of course only devices using exactly that version can access the notes.

BerndP may be right that there could be problems with Linux based server systems and NASes because MS is using an own sync protocol based on SMB for notebooks that are not stored in the cloud (the protocol used there is Cobalt); I did not experience any problems yet on an old Synology DS 112 with DSM 5 software but I do not use it very excessively as almost all my notebooks are stored on several MS accounts (another way to expand your storage capacity) and a Office 365 account (1 TB storage, should last for a while).

Using OneNote you can forget all NASes based on Linux. They all lack a full implementation of the SMB protocoll, especially partial file locking (intensively used by OneNote). This results in corrupted section files.

Bernd

Hi Becky,

The feature that you would like to use is currently not yet implemented on OneNote. We encourage you to submit your issue using Feedback Hub. You can either vote on an existing submission or submit a new issue. When you submit a feedback item we gather additional details and information about your issue that will help determine what’s causing it and address it. Feedback items regularly receive Microsoft responses on the submission in the Feedback app so you can see what we are doing about your feedback. Please revisit frequently to see the status of your feedback items.

1. On a Windows 10 device, search for "Feedback Hub" in Cortana search, then launch the app.
2. Navigate to Feedback in the left menu, then press + Add new feedback.
3. Select the Problem, and share any details you think are relevant, and choose an appropriate category and subcategory.
4. Important: If possible, reproduce the problem(s) after clicking Begin monitoring (or Start capture) near the end of the form; Stop monitoring when you're done.
5. Once you've completed the form and monitoring, click Submit.
6. Click Continue using Feedback Hub.
7. Click My feedback at the top, then find the item you submitted. (it may take a while to appear)
8. Open the item you submitted, then click Share.
9. Click Copy link, then paste the link in your response. (It will look like https://aka.ms/link>)

Feel free to reach out to use for further concerns.

There are not too many options to make this work. I would suggest finding a NAS that is running windows storage server so that way you could install OneDrive on an internal hard drive of the NAS and use it native on the system. I personally use a QNAP NAS and it uses a modified LINUX operating system so there is not a native way to install OneDrive and make it work on the NAS itself. You would have to use a third party cloud system to be able to access the OneDrive contents on the NAS, like for instance OwnCloud. For example if I wanted this to work on my QNAP, I would have to map a drive to a windows machine, install OneDrive on that mapped drive and then use a cloud access app to access the OneDrive folder. The whole problem is the operating system on the NAS.

I hope that at least that gives you more information to go on. ;)