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So...at my day job I've spent years being a OneNote evangelist. Like: to the point of obnoxiousness. Because when you're trying to live a paperless life, and you have to keep track of notes and printouts and emails and their attachments and all manner of things, OneNote (the Windows version) is hard to beat. You can type notes, you can create tables, you can set it up as a printer and print to it, you can drag files to it, with two clicks you can send an email and all its attachments to it. At this point I have about 8 years worth of folders of investigations (all conveniently searchable, for those times when you can't quite remember when you last dealt with this particular piece of equipment or the like). Anyway, I think you're getting the idea of how much I love this program.
And then several months ago we started having relationship problems. OneNote got moody. She'd give me the silent treatment and sit there "not responding" for 5-10 minutes at a time. And if she got in "that mood" when I was trying to copy over an email from Outlook, she'd get Outlook to freeze me out too. I mean, I though Outlook was my friend!
So, ok, I go to Google and start searching on "onenote not responding frozen" and that sort of thing. And I discover that other people have been having the problem for years! And no one has a good solution. Oh, there are lots of suggestions, but nothing that really solves the problem permanently. I try some things. One seemed to work...for half a day. The the freezes came back.
Now: you need to understand that I really really REALLY rely on OneNote for my workflows. And every once in a while, I'd be in a meeting and be trying to look up some data or correspondence and suddenly I'd get the "not responding" message and couldn't do anything. So I was starting to get desperate.
The contexts and the rhythm of the issue (as well as some of the online discussion about it) suggested that the trigger for the problem was OneNote's synchronization process. That makes sense. I'm synchronizing data between my local copy and my employer's servers. I pulled up the connection monitor and watched the data speed during the frozen periods. Slow, although not that much slower than it was when everything was working ok. Do I need a higher speed internet connection? That would be annoying. (And I'm not sure that AT&T provides anything faster in my neighborhood.) Do I need to turn off my VPN? Not really a solution because there are a lot of activites I need it running for and I don't want to have to switch back and forth constantly.
If synchronization with the remote files is the problem, how about I move my notebooks to my laptop's hard drive? This is very much not ideal. One of the big advantages of having them on the company server is that I can drop an alias to the OneNote folder in my investigation folder (where all the official copies of the reports and attachments live) in case someone needs to get up to speed on my investigations in my absence. But if I must, I must.
But before I did something that drastic, I needed to make sure it would work the way I wanted it to. So I made a new notebook called "test" and tried to save it on my laptop. "I'm sorry Dave," the program said. "I can't do that." It created an alias on my laptop, but sent the actual data file off into OneDrive land, somewhere I can't even locate it in my files. Huh, I said. That's odd.
More Googling, this time on "OneNote save local file" and that sort of thing. Ah, here's the problem. At some point the conjunction of OneNote under Windows 10 (I think?) the program no longer allowed saving notebooks anywhere except OneDrive. No way, nohow. Not possible.
Huh, I said. Because all my regular notebooks--the ones I've been using for years--sure look like the files are sitting there in my personal folder on the company server. Maybe they're grandfathered in? So can I just copy *those* over to my hard drive as a workaround?
And as I'm poking around in the program trying to figure out if that would work, I'm looking at the panel that talks about file synchronization and it has this pair of checkboxes: "Synchronize automatically" and "Synchronize manually". Aha! If the synchronization process is what's slowing things down, then how about if I set it to synchronize manually and then make it part of my routine that I hit "sync" at the end of the work day when it doesn't matter how long it takes? So I clicked over to "synchronize manually" [drumroll please....] and had no further problems with the program freezing or "not responding" for the rest of the day.
Success!
Now I get to the end of the workday and I go back to that panel and click "manually synchronize all notebooks". And nothing happens. Well, this is annoying, because I have no idea how this may affect my data. Do I now have a local version on my laptop that will gradually drift away from the "official" version on the company server? I check the file for something I"ve been working on after turning off syncing. The file on the company server has a revision timestamp that reflects those changes. Is this going to mean that I'll lose the ability to back up my files? I check the file properties for one of my OneNote folders and it shows several recent versions saved by our regular server backup system. So if something horrible happened, I could retrieve an older version that way.
So I *think* I"ve accidentally stumbled into success. My notebooks appear to live on the company server because I created them before the Windows upgrade. Evidently. Maybe. Turning of synchronization doesn't seem to affect anything (so far). I have regular backups available independent of anything the program is doing. And as long as everything keeps working that way and I don't start getting freezes again, I honestly don't care *why* it's working for me.
And then several months ago we started having relationship problems. OneNote got moody. She'd give me the silent treatment and sit there "not responding" for 5-10 minutes at a time. And if she got in "that mood" when I was trying to copy over an email from Outlook, she'd get Outlook to freeze me out too. I mean, I though Outlook was my friend!
So, ok, I go to Google and start searching on "onenote not responding frozen" and that sort of thing. And I discover that other people have been having the problem for years! And no one has a good solution. Oh, there are lots of suggestions, but nothing that really solves the problem permanently. I try some things. One seemed to work...for half a day. The the freezes came back.
Now: you need to understand that I really really REALLY rely on OneNote for my workflows. And every once in a while, I'd be in a meeting and be trying to look up some data or correspondence and suddenly I'd get the "not responding" message and couldn't do anything. So I was starting to get desperate.
The contexts and the rhythm of the issue (as well as some of the online discussion about it) suggested that the trigger for the problem was OneNote's synchronization process. That makes sense. I'm synchronizing data between my local copy and my employer's servers. I pulled up the connection monitor and watched the data speed during the frozen periods. Slow, although not that much slower than it was when everything was working ok. Do I need a higher speed internet connection? That would be annoying. (And I'm not sure that AT&T provides anything faster in my neighborhood.) Do I need to turn off my VPN? Not really a solution because there are a lot of activites I need it running for and I don't want to have to switch back and forth constantly.
If synchronization with the remote files is the problem, how about I move my notebooks to my laptop's hard drive? This is very much not ideal. One of the big advantages of having them on the company server is that I can drop an alias to the OneNote folder in my investigation folder (where all the official copies of the reports and attachments live) in case someone needs to get up to speed on my investigations in my absence. But if I must, I must.
But before I did something that drastic, I needed to make sure it would work the way I wanted it to. So I made a new notebook called "test" and tried to save it on my laptop. "I'm sorry Dave," the program said. "I can't do that." It created an alias on my laptop, but sent the actual data file off into OneDrive land, somewhere I can't even locate it in my files. Huh, I said. That's odd.
More Googling, this time on "OneNote save local file" and that sort of thing. Ah, here's the problem. At some point the conjunction of OneNote under Windows 10 (I think?) the program no longer allowed saving notebooks anywhere except OneDrive. No way, nohow. Not possible.
Huh, I said. Because all my regular notebooks--the ones I've been using for years--sure look like the files are sitting there in my personal folder on the company server. Maybe they're grandfathered in? So can I just copy *those* over to my hard drive as a workaround?
And as I'm poking around in the program trying to figure out if that would work, I'm looking at the panel that talks about file synchronization and it has this pair of checkboxes: "Synchronize automatically" and "Synchronize manually". Aha! If the synchronization process is what's slowing things down, then how about if I set it to synchronize manually and then make it part of my routine that I hit "sync" at the end of the work day when it doesn't matter how long it takes? So I clicked over to "synchronize manually" [drumroll please....] and had no further problems with the program freezing or "not responding" for the rest of the day.
Success!
Now I get to the end of the workday and I go back to that panel and click "manually synchronize all notebooks". And nothing happens. Well, this is annoying, because I have no idea how this may affect my data. Do I now have a local version on my laptop that will gradually drift away from the "official" version on the company server? I check the file for something I"ve been working on after turning off syncing. The file on the company server has a revision timestamp that reflects those changes. Is this going to mean that I'll lose the ability to back up my files? I check the file properties for one of my OneNote folders and it shows several recent versions saved by our regular server backup system. So if something horrible happened, I could retrieve an older version that way.
So I *think* I"ve accidentally stumbled into success. My notebooks appear to live on the company server because I created them before the Windows upgrade. Evidently. Maybe. Turning of synchronization doesn't seem to affect anything (so far). I have regular backups available independent of anything the program is doing. And as long as everything keeps working that way and I don't start getting freezes again, I honestly don't care *why* it's working for me.
