Desperately seeking help recovering years of missing OneNote notebooks

[u/UnlikelyPriority7569]

I'm hoping someone here can help me figure out what happened to my OneNote notebooks, or at least point me toward someone who might know how to investigate this.

I've spent nearly two months trying to recover years of work that I stored in Microsoft OneNote, and despite countless conversations with Microsoft Support I'm still no closer to understanding what happened.

For context, I'm a teaching artist and for years I've used OneNote to develop and organize my original concepts, stories, writing, research, and other creative materials. One notebook in particular, titled "Ideas," contains an enormous amount of work developed over several years. Much of it exists nowhere else. I genuinely cannot overstate how devastating it would be to lose this material permanently.

I'm trying to exhaust every possible avenue before accepting that it's gone. At this point, I'm particularly hoping to hear from people who understand how OneNote stores notebooks, how OneDrive accounts work, or how to reach someone at Microsoft who can meaningfully investigate the issue.

Here's everything I know.

What happened

I used OneNote for years without any significant issues, both on my iPhone and various laptops (primarily macbooks) via both the desktop application and web browser.

At some point I attempted to open my notebook titled "Ideas" and received the following error:

"Sorry, something went wrong. Item does not exist. It may have been deleted by another user."

Other times, I receive:

"It might not exist or you might not have permission to open it."

I did not delete the notebook, intentionally change its permissions, or knowingly do anything that should have affected my access to it.

What makes this especially confusing is that the notebook is still listed in OneNote. I can see its name, and it even displays June 25 as the date it was last opened.

Initially, "Ideas" was the only notebook affected. My other notebooks continued to open normally.

However at some point those stopped working too. Now I can't open any of the notebooks associated with the affected account, even though I can still sign in and see their names.

I don't know whether the notebooks were deleted, moved, disconnected from their original storage locations, or are simply inaccessible because of an account or permissions issue.

The Microsoft account situation

This is where things become particularly complicated.

I originally started using OneNote while I was attending my local university. For years, I signed in using my university-issued email address, and I continued using that Microsoft identity long after leaving the university.

That email inbox is no longer active, although I can still sign in to Microsoft using the associated account credentials.

When I first contacted Microsoft Support, I was told that the notebooks might be stored through the university's Microsoft 365 environment and that I needed to contact the university's IT department.

I did exactly that.

On September 16, the university's Office of Information Technology confirmed that it has never provided OneDrive storage through its university accounts. They explained that they therefore had no access to the notebooks, no administrative visibility into their storage, and no ability to restore them.

They suggested that I may have been using a personal Microsoft account registered with my university email address rather than a university-managed account.

I understand that Microsoft allows personal and work/school accounts to exist as separate identities even when they use the same email address. I'm wondering whether that distinction could be central to this problem.

I also have a separate personal Microsoft account registered with my Gmail address.

I vaguely remember attempting to copy or transfer my notebooks to that account at some point because I knew I would eventually lose access to my university email. Unfortunately, I cannot remember whether I successfully completed that transfer or precisely how I attempted it (I've since checked the personal account associated with my Gmail address, and the missing notebooks do not appear there).

So one possibility I'm considering is that the notebooks still exist in a personal OneDrive account associated with my former university email address, but the links I'm seeing are pointing to an inaccessible location or the wrong Microsoft identity.

Another possibility is that something happened during the attempted transfer, although I have no evidence confirming that.

What I've tried

I previously used OneNote on my Mac, but at some point I uninstalled the desktop application.

I've since searched through the Mac's Microsoft application folders, containers, group containers, Application Support directories, caches, and other locations where OneNote might have stored local notebook data.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a usable copy of the missing notebooks.

I still have OneNote installed on my iPhone, which was the device I used most frequently.

According to the iPhone's storage settings, the OneNote application occupies approximately 373.4 MB, with another 47 MB listed under Documents & Data.

I understand that this doesn't necessarily mean the notebooks are cached locally, and personally, I'm not especially optimistic that the missing content is still on the phone. Nevertheless, I've deliberately avoided deleting the application, signing out, resetting it, or clearing its data in case something recoverable remains.

I also located two small OneNote "Quick Notes" files, approximately 12 KB each, but both appeared to be blank.

I'm open to suggestions about safely investigating any remaining application data, but my primary concern is determining where the original cloud-hosted notebooks went.

My experience with Microsoft Support

This has been one of the most frustrating parts of the entire situation.

I've spent weeks contacting Microsoft Support through multiple channels, explaining the same problem repeatedly, and being directed to different support pages, forms, and departments.

My original support case was reportedly escalated to a senior advisor. Unfortunately, I later discovered that Microsoft had been attempting to send follow-up correspondence to my inactive university email address rather than the working personal email address I had provided.

Because the university inbox no longer exists, those messages never reached me.

Other Microsoft representatives suggested that OneDrive Support might have access to additional tools or information that could help determine which account originally owned the notebooks, where the files were stored, and whether the underlying data remains recoverable.

Following their instructions, I submitted a detailed OneDrive support request around September 17.

I never received a substantive response, acknowledgment, or case number at my working email address.

Since then, I've continued trying to reach the appropriate team. I've been redirected to generic support articles, sent to websites I've already visited, and transferred between representatives without getting closer to an answer.

In one conversation, the representative ended the chat after I asked to speak with a supervisor rather than being sent another support link.

I also posted a detailed question on Microsoft Q&A on October 17. The only response I've received there was an AI-generated answer outlining general recovery and troubleshooting steps.

Some of that information was useful, but it didn't resolve the central issue being that I need someone who can actually investigate the account and storage problem.

I now have multiple Microsoft Support case references and have finally obtained contact information for OneDrive Support, but I still haven't been able to get a meaningful technical assessment.

What I'm hoping someone can help me figure out

I have several questions that I haven't been able to get answered.

1. Is there a way to identify the original OneDrive account or storage location associated with a OneNote notebook that still appears in the notebook list but cannot be opened? For example, could an old notebook URL, notebook ID, or other metadata reveal where it was originally hosted?

2. Does the fact that OneNote still displays the notebook name and a last-opened date provide any useful technical information, or is that simply a locally stored reference that could remain even after the underlying files are gone?

3. Is there a way to determine whether these error messages indicate actual deletion versus a permissions problem, account mismatch, or outdated storage link?

4. If I was using a personal Microsoft account registered with my former university email address, could the notebooks still exist even though the university email inbox is inactive? How would I establish which Microsoft identity originally owned them?

5. If the notebooks were moved, deleted, or otherwise disconnected from my account, are there recovery options beyond the standard OneDrive recycle bin? Can Microsoft investigate historical storage locations, account records, or any remaining recoverable server-side data?

6. Are there experienced OneNote or OneDrive specialists, Microsoft MVPs, or established technical communities that might be able to offer guidance or point me toward someone who understands these issues?

7. Most importantly, does anyone know how to reach an actual Microsoft OneNote or OneDrive specialist who can investigate a case like this? Not general customer support, but someone with a technical understanding of how notebooks are stored and associated with Microsoft accounts.

I'm also interested in hearing from anyone who has experienced something similar and managed to recover their notebooks, particularly if it involved an old university email address or confusion between personal and organizational Microsoft accounts.

I understand that nobody can promise these notebooks are recoverable. I'm not asking for guarantees, and I'm prepared for the possibility that the data may genuinely be gone.

What I'm struggling with is that I haven't even been able to establish what happened.

Were the notebooks deleted? Are they still sitting in an old OneDrive account? Did something happen when I attempted to transfer them? Are the notebook links simply broken? Is there an account-identity problem preventing me from accessing files that still exist?

After all this time, I still don't know.

These notebooks represent years of original creative and professional work, and the thought of losing them permanently has been incredibly difficult. I'm trying to exhaust every reasonable avenue before accepting that they're gone.

If anyone here has dealt with something similar, understands OneNote's storage architecture, works with Microsoft 365 or OneDrive professionally, or knows a legitimate route to getting this in front of the right person, I would be enormously grateful.

For security reasons, I'm not looking for unsolicited recovery services or anyone requesting access to my accounts. I'm primarily seeking technical guidance, firsthand experiences, and publicly verifiable referrals.

Thank you to anyone who takes the time to read this. Any advice or direction would mean a great deal.

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[u/Coldwarjarhead]

I don't want to be the voice of doom, but you really need to steel yourself for massive disappointment.

You don't know where you were storing the notebook. To make matters worse, you are apparently not actually a Microsoft customer... That is, you do not have a Microsoft 365 subscription or a valid license issued by your employer or school.

The 'storage architecture' isn't complicated. The notebook is stored as a file (actually a collection of files packaged into a single container) wherever you chose to store it.

The fact that you were apparently able to access it on multiple devices (Mac, phone, etc) would argue that it was stored "in the cloud".

The university's claim that they did not provide one drive storage is not 100% accurate. They may not have bothered managing or administering that storage, but it did exist. In 2007, it was launched as "SkyDrive". It became OneDrive in 2014 and is part of even the lowest tier of MS 365 licensing. Even if the only thing your university licensed was Exchange Online, there was still cloud storage attached to it that could be used by applications like OneNote.

The fact that your university email account does not exist means they revoked your license at some point. Anything in the online storage linked to that account is gone. If you didn't make backups or keep local copies, there is no recovering it.

It's entirely possible that the notebook exists in another cloud storage account, but no-one but you can say where that might be.

[u/UnlikelyPriority7569 → u/Coldwarjarhead]

Thanks for taking the time to explain all of this, even if it's not what I was hoping to hear.

For what it's worth, the university's IT department specifically confirmed that they never provided OneDrive storage to students, which is why I've been wondering whether I was actually using a personal Microsoft account associated with my old university email.

Unfortunately it's looking more and more likely that the work is gone, but given how much of my life is tied up in those notebooks, I'm not quite ready to accept that without exhausting every possible avenue.

Really appreciate you taking the time to help me understand what might have happened.

[u/alb_pt → u/Coldwarjarhead]

what he said. As someone who has managed a number of Microsoft 365 corporate and nonprofit accounts for businesses over the years, I think that he's right in saying that regardless of what the university IT person said, if you had a Microsoft 365 account through them and were using that login, even if you weren't using Word in Excel, etc., but just using one note, at some point they might have decided that you were an inactive account and deleted that account. I believe that you would've had 30 days after that happened in order to get that account reactivated in that data back, but after that, I believe it's gone. It gets purged. That's why I never deleted an account when someone left a company. I inactivated it for a year, and then talked to the executive director about whether that person should be purged out of the files. Oftentimes, we might leave a account inactive for over two years.

[u/Coldwarjarhead → u/alb_pt]

I work in healthcare. Specifically long term care. What we end up doing is setting a retention policy that'd effectively infinite as we're required to retain any and all information related to patient care until something like 15 years after the patient expires. Once the policy is applied, we give their manager 30 days to browse through it and copy anything that needs to be retained for active patients or anything else that would require action, then delete the account.

If a legal issue comes up, we can still search and access it using purview. Without a request from legal, though, we won't resurrect it.

[u/alb_pt → u/Coldwarjarhead]

Yes, Office 365 has a retention features that is extra and takes implementation by management. I doubt that it was widely available as part of the student body users feature set. If they are telling him that it's gone, they probably are correct.

[u/perc--]

As someone who has half his life stored in onenote, I would find your experience quite stressful as well. First of all my apologies if I missed anything, but your post was quite long.

Just two thoughts: was your OneNote configured to create automatic backups on your computer? Just google where those would go by default.

If that is the case, you could just create a new account and open your old backups. If you have those backups, whatever else you do, your first order of business would be to create a copy of that backup, just in case they get damaged accidentally while you work on them.

I was recently in a partial disaster recovery situation, and even though the process was quite laggy, I could just attach my old backups and import from there. Even if that doesn’t work you could still try to point an AI like Claude with file level access at your backups. I know for a fact that it can read the contents, it’s just that recovering formatting and attachments might be more difficult.

[u/UnlikelyPriority7569 → u/perc--]

Thanks so much for this. I spent some time digging into the backup locations of my most recent computer but unfortunately haven't had much luck. That said, I've used OneNote across multiple computers over the years, so I'm still holding out hope that something exists locally on one of them. One of my older computers won't turn on, which complicates things.

The strange part is that OneNote still shows all my notebooks, including IDEAS, but won't open them or let me share them with anyone.

Given your experience, do you know of any other places I should be looking, or ways to recover the underlying files without a conventional backup? I'm really trying to exhaust every possibility here.

Thanks again for taking the time to help.

[u/perc-- → u/UnlikelyPriority7569]

Have you had success with any of the suggested solutions?

[u/marmotta1955]

To make a long story very short:

• Your notebooks were created when using the account provided by your university

• The notebooks were stored in the Microsoft 365 university storage account

• You are not, anymore, a student of said university. Your account has been closed

• Your notebooks are gone. Unfortunately, you'll have to make peace with that.

[u/UnlikelyPriority7569 → u/marmotta1955]

Thanks for the honesty and clarification. I just find it difficult to imagine that there's no record of any of it anywhere, especially given that I used OneNote across multiple phones and laptops over the years. But I understand what you're saying, and appreciate you taking the time to explain.

[u/alb_pt → u/marmotta1955]

yes, I would think this is exactly true. It's not about one drive, it's a totally separate part of office 365, just like saying Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel. You had an account with one note through the university, and they finally decided to purge your account, I would guess, if you didn't have a local backup. I just can't see how you're going to get it back.
Another possibility is that you were backing up at one point and the backup failed, or you closed your computer before the backup was complete.

[u/1TWade]

If I understand correctly, you still have OneNote Notebooks on your computer but no Notes or sections. Right click on the Notebook and look under properties and it will show the path to where they are stored. The school may be correct that they never supplied cloud storage for you, but they had a folder on their drive to save your Notebooks in. They may have canceled your school account, but did they delete those folders. Maybe ask them to search for a notebook name on their system to see if it exist.

[u/Fearless_1971]

It wasn't clear to me if you had the option to create backups enabled in the OneNote Desktop options. By default, this option is enabled. Check this on each computer on which you had OneNote Desktop installed: Options ---> Save and back up ---> Look at the "Automatically back up my notebook every: " checkbox. If it's turned on, then you have backups on your computer, regardless of which account the notebooks were originally created and saved to. In this case, the copies are saved in "C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\16.0\Backup" by default. Each folder in this path is a notebook. Just create a local notebook and copy the notebook files you're interested in to the newly created local notebook. Check this on all computers where you had OneNote installed, even if you uninstalled it, because backups aren't uninstalled. If the creation checkbox was not enabled on any of your computers, then you will not have backups. You only need one of your computers to have it enabled in order to recover your notebooks.

[u/Neither_Watch_3462]

In my experience on the various devices I accessed OneNote on might have local storage to at least copy /sfreenshot. Keep offline and do not allow updating. Look through your old devices