OneDrive phantoms

Question

I've 3 phantom Notebooks that I'd like to delete but can't find a way to. Please help.

Answer 1

This is commonly known as 'OneNote Ghost Notebooks' and is a bug in OneNote, not OneDrive. I have spent a couple of years being annoyed by this, but last week was able to work out a solution. The process may not be for everyone, as it requires an old installation of MS office.

What are ghost notebooks?

The ghost notebooks have four main features:

• The short address of the notebook contains the "tilda" character .^ If you try and open the location of the notebook, OneNote will show a message "We couldn't find a notebook at ..."
• The ghost notebooks are about 10 years old and were created (and probably deleted) using an earlier installation of OneNote.
• On the open notebooks page of OneNote (PC or Mac - not mobile versions), right clicking on the notebook and selecting "Remove from list" makes the notebook disappear for a couple of seconds before it reappears.
• Opening OneNote on your mobile phone displays an error that you have to click past every single time you open the app.

The solution:

You need to log into a copy of Office 2016 using your current MS office account. Once in Office 2016, you go to the Open Notebook page, where you will be able to successfully right click on the ghost (buggy) notebook and select "Remove from list". The notebook will stay removed and disappear from all copies of OneNote, including the list on your phone.

Office 2016:

How to get office 2016? You need to either find a computer that is still running Office 2016 and log in to OneNote with your current Microsoft account. Maybe a friend still is running a copy, or there is the old machine sat in the corner of your office running windows 10 and office 2016.

Or try here: [Useful Microsoft Office download links](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5267537/useful-microsoft-download-links-for-office-(direct)

If installing Office 2016 on your current computer, be aware that you will first need to UNINSTALL your current version of Office, because Windows won't let you run both versions at the same time. I would advise you to make sure you are fully backed up before messing around with your software (especially your emails if you are using Outlook.) Having said that, I was able to uninstall my current version of office, install 2016, remove the ghost notebooks and then reinstall the current version of office without losing data or emails. But do so at your own risk. It's better to use a separate computer to be 100% sure your data will be OK.

Cheers and good luck.

I hope this post is of use to the many, many others who have been annoyed by this bug.

Answer 2

Hello Melvyn Brown,

Thank you for reaching out in Microsoft Q&A forum

I understand how confusing it is to see phantom OneNote notebooks that you can’t remove.

These “ghost” notebooks usually appear when a notebook was deleted or moved, but OneNote/OneDrive still keeps a leftover reference. You can remove them by clearing the old notebook links from both OneNote and OneDrive:

Step 1: Remove the notebook from OneNote (do this for each phantom notebook):

• OneNote for Windows 10 / OneNote App: Open OneNote > Go to File > Open > Under Recent notebooks, right‑click the phantom notebook > Select Remove from list.
• OneNote 2016: Open OneNote > Go to File > Info > Click Close this Notebook.

Step 2: Check OneDrive for leftover notebook folders

• Go to https://www.onedrive.com > Open the Documents folder (or the location where your notebooks are usually stored) > Look for folders named after the phantom notebooks.
• If they exist, delete the folder.

Step 3: Clear OneNote cache

• Close OneNote > Press Win + R, type:

    %localappdata%\Microsoft\OneNote
  

• Open the folder for your version (e.g., 16.0 or 17.0) > Delete the Cache folder.
• Restart OneNote.

Step 4: Restart OneDrive

• Right-click the OneDrive icon in the taskbar > Choose Quit OneDrive.
• Open Start menu > type OneDrive > Relaunch it.

If the phantom notebooks still appear, it may be due to old links stored in OneNote Online:

• Go to your OneNote > see if the phantom notebooks appear there > If yes > click … > Close or Delete.

Let me know how it goes

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