One note notebooks disappearing (please help!!)

Question

Hello! I changed my ipad where I take notes on the One note app recently, and when I tried to open my notebooks they were practically all gone except for those I used this year. I´ve been taking notes all throughout college for the past 5 years, and 4 years of notes just disappeared. I´ve tried opening them through One drive, as they do appear listed:

But when I try opening them the message I receive is:

I would really appreciate the help, my entire college studies are in those notebooks and I cannot lose them :(

Answer 1

Dear @Rebe Qui,

Good day. Thank you for posting your question in the Microsoft Q&A forum!

First of all, I’m sorry you’re having a problem and for the situation you encountered, I deeply understand the inconvenience caused and apologize for it.

To better assistance, could you please provide detail information below:

• Was the notebook stored in OneDrive or locally on the iPad?
• What version of OneNote and iPadOS is currently installed?
• May I kindly confirm whether the account you are using to sign in to OneNote is a school-provided account or your personal Microsoft account?
• May I ask whether you have already graduated?

In the meantime, I recommend some steps you can try to recover the missing notes:

1.Don’t sign out or reinstall OneNote on the iPad: Those actions can permanently clear unsynced local content on iOS.

2.Check OneNote Online Log in OneNote on web version to see if the notes appear in the cloud version.

3.Check Version History in OneNote Online, View > Page version > Restore earlier versions if available.

4.Make sure you're signed into the correct Microsoft account, especially if the notebooks were shared or synced from another source. If you can find the notebook’s link in OneDrive, you can also try opening it manually in the desktop app.

There’s a chance OneNote stored a local cache of your notebooks. On Windows, you can check under C:\Users<YourUsername>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\ for backup files.

5.Additionally, please follow the steps outlined in the article and check whether they are helpful in your case. Fix issues when you can't sync OneNote

5.If you are using school account, please kindly ask your IT administrator to check:

• Your OneDrive and OneNote account status in the school tenant
• Whether the notebooks still exist in OneDrive (including Version History and Recycle Bin)
• Whether the notebooks can be restored from backups or previous versions

If none of this works, kindly contact your organization Admin to check below for you. 

If the issue still present, you may also (use admin account to) go to Office 365 Admin Center> Support> New Service Request. The support engineers there have the correct escalation channel, and this is the most efficient way to report such issue. You can refer to this article to check the way how to raise a ticket: Ways to contact support for business products - Admin help. The engineers in related team have higher permission and resources than us to help check the root cause from background directly.  they may be able to help recover your notebooks from server-side backups.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to reply below if you have any update or further concern.  

Your patience and understanding are highly appreciated. I am looking forward to your response!

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