My girlfriend and I have a shared OneNote 2007 notebook to keep track of our move to Germany. That particular notebook is stored on my desktop and available to use on my desktop, my tablet and my girlfriend’s laptop. Right now though, my desktop is sitting in a shipping container in a US port waiting for the ship to take it to Germany while its hard drives went over the Atlantic in my carry on luggage.

When I got to Germany, I realized that our notebook would not sync anymore because the server containing the notebook (my desktop) was not there. Considering that this is the notebook we use for our move, keeping it in sync is very important right now.

I figured I could ask my fellow OneNote MVPs and the members of the OneNote team if they had any suggestions what to do in this situation. The biggest problem was that changes had been made to the notebook on both computers, so the two copies were out of sync. If they had not been out of sync, I would have just created a new shared notebook (stored on my tablet) and copied the sections from the current one into it. But with them out of sync, I would have been forced to manually go through each section and page…

Thankfully, Daniel Escapa, a OneNote program manager, had a great suggestion that worked flawlessly:

1. Find a USB key
2. On you Tablet right-click on the notebook and choose properties
3. Choose to sync the notebook to a new location, and have it saved to the USB key
4. Try the same on the other machine

After following these steps, I now have the notebook synced again on both laptops via the USB stick. I could have chosen a network share (hosted on my tablet) instead of the USB stick, but then I couldn’t keep them in sync when both laptops are not on the same LAN (which will be the case while we are apartment hunting in Berlin).

So if you ever find yourself with several OneNote clients that hold the same notebook offline, but with no access to the server containing the notebook, now you know what to do.

Thanks Daniel for this suggestion!