How do I recover the OneNote notebooks that disappeared; no data seems available locally, and in OneDrive.

Hello,

I’m an Independent Advisor and Microsoft user like you. I understand your concern as the OneNote files went missing.

Kindly try below steps to restore the OneNote files.

Step 1: Restore backup from your OneDrive If you suspect that your notes are on OneDrive and searching for them in OneNote hasn’t worked, try to locate them in your OneDrive folders directly, without using OneNote

1. Sign in to your OneDrive account from the OneDrive home page - https://www.onedrive.com/ or by using the OneDrive app for Windows 10.
2. Browse through your OneDrive folders (for example, Documents or Notebooks) for any notebook files you're looking for.
3. When you've found the notebook you want, click to open it in OneNote for the web.

Step 2: Check the default backup locations Depending on your computer's operating system, backups of your notebook files are stored in one of the following default locations:

On Windows 10, the Backup folder for your notebooks is located at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\version\Backup. Or below path in Windows 11 %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\16.0

If you've tried all the steps above and you still haven't found your notes, perhaps you—or someone else with access to your notebooks—deleted them. Fortunately, OneNote automatically saves notes for a limited time after they have been deleted.

1. Open the notebook where you expected to find the lost notes
2. Choose View > Deleted Notes.

If you find your deleted notes here, you can recover them by moving the pages back to their intended locations:

1. Tap and hold, or right-click the name of any page that you want to recover, and then choose Restore To.
2. Choose the notebook section where you want to move the page, and then choose Restore.
3. Repeat steps 1-2 with any other pages that you want to move out of Deleted Notes.

Please find the details here - https://support.microsoft.com/office/32cb2bd7-afe7-44d2-a711-398a88421287

If none of these helps you, you can reach out to Microsoft chat support. https://support.microsoft.com/contactus">https://support.microsoft.com/contactus">https://support.microsoft.com/contactus">https://support.microsoft.com/contactus

1. Go here https://support.microsoft.com/contactus
2. Type Subscription cancellation
3. Select subscription type and proceed

Refer this link for global contact numbers - https://support.microsoft.com/topic/c0389ade-5640-e588-8b0e-28de8afeb3f2

Hope this information would be useful to you. Please feel free to get back if you need any additional info.

Thank you! Ravikumar Help the next person who has this issue by indicating if this reply solved your problem. Click Yes or No below.

Hello, thanks.

That didn't work. Because the notebooks aren't deleted and are not exactly backedup properly?

I did find the backups as I mentioned but the backups appear to be empty. It says the files have been moved or you don't have permission to them. But I created them and no one else had access to it.

I had access to those same notebooks on my phone but when it started to show this error on my laptop, my phone stopped opening the notes too. Saying again that I don't have access permission.

Hi again, no sorry. It is not available in OneNote online or OneDrive. And the local URL format backups appear to be empty or something of thay sort. Either ways they don't work.

But it's so puzzling they kust be somewhere. I can see the preview cards in my phone so they are not completely wiped off the app or its history but when I try to open them it says the notebooks have been moved.

Thanks.

Could you please login into web and try to download the OneNote files from cloud?

https://www.onedrive.com

Thanks, Ravikumar

The preview cards of the deleted notebooks are available on my phone