Moving all OneNote2007 content to a new computer?

[Jonathan]

After a lot of searching here in the forum and in Help files I find nothing
on exactly this process: I have bought a new laptop and want to move all
Notebooks and the Untitled material to my new laptop and its OneNote2007.
This will be a move from a WinXP to Vista Business environment. I plan to
leave the OneNote installed on the previous computer for my daughter to use,
because the license I have allows this.

I can see that just opting to have the notebooks live on a USB flash drive
will work after a fashion, but I don't know how to anticipate problems with
an arrangement that is tied in any way to a computer I have given up, even if
the original files are erased on this WinXP machine. In addition, Unfiled
pages are treated differently for sync, as I understand the posts here.

I plan to *leave* the notebooks on my USB drive from now on and be able to
work with all the notebooks on either this new computer or a WinXP Home
desktop in my house. Therefore there are a lot of other notebooks that will
have to join the ones that permanently leave the old laptop. As other people
here have noted, this means more opportunities to lose all my data, so
precautions would include copies of all notebook files on optical disks every
few days...

As a side comment, it's frustrating that I can't find info on this in the
Help Files - on- or off-line.

Thanks, in advance, for suggestions from all of you.

Jonathan

 

[Jonathan]

After a lot of searching here in the forum and in Help files I find nothing

on exactly this process: I have bought a new laptop and want to move all
Notebooks and the Untitled material to my new laptop and its OneNote2007.

Replying to my own post: First, dvjames's excellent post right after mine
today has good questions and suggestions for movable data and folder
structure, and I will absorb that. The safety of the data is part of my OP,
too.

I read "Share an existing notebook among my computers" from the Help file
and it says I should just take the core files right out of my "OneNote
Notebooks" folder and move them to the thumb drive. Then fire up OneNote on
my new laptop and "show" OneNote the location from which to load its content.
From then on there's no looking back at the old laptop... thay became truly
mobile when I cut them out of Windows Explorer and put them on the thumb
drive.

Is it that simple? (other than the usability/safety questions raised by
dvjames...)

Jonathan

 

[dvjames]

It's been very easy to do that. I just drop in my thumb drive, open up ON and
hit F9 (sync all notebooks). There are three computers in varying states of
data that seem to sync perfectly as needed no matter how I update them.
Forget your thumb drive? np. Just feel free to add data, add ON sections or
whever, then bring the thumb drive in tomorrow and sync it then. I wouldn't
wait too long tho, you never know it sudden becomes too much data to sync. <g>

The challenge is that I didn't realize I should create a folder structure
ahead of time because I was just attaching files wherever they might be. I
should know better, but I didn't expect to like ON this much. Maybe I'm too
anal <g>, but I have data going back quite a few years and it can get a
little weird if one doesn't do a little thinking ahead of time.

I'm hoping to hear from some of the others on this...

 

[dvjames]

BTW, you can move current ON notebooks to the thumbdrive by right-clicking
the notebook in the left column, selecting properties, and changing the
location to the thumbdrive. Don't worry in which USB port you stick the
drive, ON names the thumbdrives and keeps that info internally so it can ID
the drive when you reconnect again.

 

[Jonathan]

Dennis,
This right-click option is exactly what I started using to move the ON
knowledge of "where" the files were. I wrote the post partly because I
wondered if there was any difference between this method of "moving" to my
new laptop and the "cut and copy the files" method. So right now it seems
there is no difference as long as I understand and honor the particular
ON2007 cache structure.

At the low cost of thumb drives I could imagine throwing any current working
drive into a safe deposit box if I was over at the bank on any business and
just starting another one when I went back to my desk. Or would that work?
it's the same scenario as losing a thumb drive. OneNote has to make a new
core file from the "satellite" files.

So all I would have to do is copy everything on the drive before putting the
drive away in storage. Now I realize that a CD-R is just as easy... make that
from the drive and put that away somewhere out of the house.

Sorry... rambling.

Jonathan

 

[dvjames]

That's sorta my question. I have copied and pasted folders into the main ON
folder on my thumb drive where the core files are, opened it up on another
computer from the Thumbdrive and had it sync up properly. but this is where
it gets a bit murky for me. I think it has to do with backing up the files
(which can be handled automatically), but how to meld the different backups
together? If the backups are all synced, then good. But if computer three
hasn't synced yet when the Thumbdrive fails, what then? Do you lose data or
once you've put the ON core files back on a thumb drive, does it just accept
that "image" and meld it all together?

This is something I'd rather not experiment with, thus my original questions.