Purpose of Offline Cache files

[chiefplt]

I have a question as to the purpose of the OneNoteOfflineCache_Files that is
created and used within my user's local settings directory. I have a very
large collection of audio files within my notebook and OneNote seems to be
duplicating every audio file here. In fact, I have another post where there
are duplicate files within my OneNote Notebooks directory, so this seems to
me to be a triplicate of my file. I set OneNote to operate using the "Work
Offline" flag and I am not using any type of synchronization for any of my
files. So why are they duplicated in this directory. I just don't have the
disk space for OneNote to use three times the storage that it actually needs
in order to store the same audio file in three different locations.

Can I delete these files? Will OneNote create them again? What are they used
for?

Thanks for the input...

chiefplt

 

[Patrick Schmid]

You can delete the Offline Cache files, but ON will always create them
again. With ON 2007, you need twice the disk space if your notes are
local.
2007 always works on the cache, never directly on your local files. That
means even though everything is local, it is first written to the cache
and then to your local files. You just never notice that step. The
reason for this is that even though the notebooks are local to the
OneNote on your machine, there might be a OneNote on another computer
using them as well. ON doesn't differentiate technically between shared
and non-shared notebooks (even though the UI suggests it does).
Therefore all notebooks have to be treated as if they could be shared.
So ON has to assume that some other ON might be making changes to the
notebooks. The cache is where ON has its fancy syncing abilities and
without writing to the cache it would completely fail if another ON was
accessing the notebooks.
I don't think there is much you can do about the offline cache.

Patrick Schmid

 

[chiefplt]

What I don't understand is that I don't see any .one files stored in the
Offline_Cache directory. All I see is my .WMA files for embedded audio. Why
would ON need to store .WMA files in the Cache directory? Once they are
recorded, I can't edit them from within ON - any new audio recording creates
a new file. Those are the files I'm really concerned about - shouldn't ON be
able to leave those in a local directory because they are never modified
anyway?

 

[Grant Robertson]

You can delete the Offline Cache files, but ON will always create them
again. With ON 2007, you need twice the disk space if your notes are
local.

OK, I am sorry, that is unacceptable as well. You should give users the
option of whether they intend to share files with others and only then
use a cache for only the shared files. To simply double the required hard
drive space for everyone just to save an extra option in a dialog is just
ludicrous. And this for a program that Microsoft suggests that we put our
entire life of notes into. What the heck are these guys thinking anyway?
I'm not going to just run out and buy a 300 GB laptop hard drive becuase
you want to waste all my space.

 

[David Rasmussen [MS]]

Patrick is right. You will always require roughly 2x space. Although we do
have a bug in the Beta currently that can cause these files to be duplicated
more than that. So if you're seeing more than 1 copy in the Offline Cache
folder that will be fixed by the time we release.

Also you don't see the .one files there because in that same directory where
that Offlice_Cache folder is there is a big OneNote Cache .one file that
contains all the native .one content (i.e. everything but attached files).

 

[David Rasmussen [MS]]

Apologies that you consider this so bad. However, it's way simpler to make a
statement like this than to actually architect a robust system that meets
everyones needs in the way you describe.
Understand that our priorities include:
- Make sure everyone's data is safe.
- Make sure users don't have to make choices they can't understand in a way
that might make their data unsafe (most users would have difficulty
interpreting how to use such an option without potentially causing issues
for themselves)
- An example here is that in many companies people have "redirected my
documents", their my documents folders are actually on a server, but cached
locally by Windows Offline files. The users just perceive them to be their
own documents on their own hard drive, being backed up to some server, but
in fact it's actually that their documents are up on a server (primary
location) and just being cached locally. So for OneNote this means that some
people aren't even 100% certain about the fact that their documents may be
on a server.
- Avoid forcing users to make decisions up front that lock them in later
(sometimes users don't know they want to share something until later,
whether with themselves or someone else)
- A bunch of details about quality of software etc. that I won't go into.
Having two different architectures = twice the number of bugs that need to
be addressed. having a single uniform architecture for how we handle files
whether remote or local improves quality.
- Make sure that the app is fast (another reason for caching is fast
performance, we read/write quickly to the cache and can replicate across to
actual files more slowly in the background)

Most people hardly need 300GB drives to support this. I have a laptop with a
30GB drive (a little old school these days) and have ~10 notebooks open that
I've been using for quite some time (a couple of years). Total storage of my
cache and cached files is around 1GB.

Even if you used our audio recording feature a lot you're talking about a
few MB per hour. So even over a year of every day use you could fill up a GB
or two, but that would be recording several hours every day.

Granted if you started storing lots of large video files in us then you
might start having issues. But if you're doing that you could store the
video separately and just put links to it in OneNote (we won't cache it
unless you insert the file into Onenote).

Storage is very cheap these days (about 50c a gigabyte and falling fast) and
size of average hard drive is going to be even larger by the time we ship
OneNote.

Hopefully you can understand why this was the right trade off for us to
make.

 

[David Rasmussen [MS]]

Oh, and one additional comment.
If you were using an early beta version of OneNote 2007 you may have a
redundant copy in there because we moved the location of the cache files.
Specifically all the cache files you care about should be under the
following path:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\OneNote\12.0

Note the 12.0 at the end of that path name. If you have other files under
....ApplicationData\Microsoft\OneNote you can delete them all except that
12.0 folder. For example you may have a folder called Backup, Index, and
OneNoteOfflineCache_Files. I wouldn't delete the backup if that contains
backups you wish to retain, but otherwise the rest of the files at this
level can be deleted, you just need to keep the 12.0 folder and its
contents.

 

[Hil]

I have to agree with Grant on this point. I'll never be sharing my notebooks
with others, and this is a huge waste for me.

For example, I've been using ON for 13 days worth of notes, and my Notebook
is now 80MB in size. At the end of a normal school year, my notes (without
pictures, audio, or anything fancy, will be aobut 1GB in size. So I'll be
using 2GB per year with this cache thing? If I had done this when I was an
undergrad, my 4 years of college would have been 8GB. That's almost a third
of your hard drive, David. If you include Windows, the rest of Office, and a
few other programs like SPSS or any multimedia content, your HD is more than
full.

The other issue I have is that the cache size seems somewhat proportional to
my performance. The larger the cache, the slower ON seems to go- at least,
today after deleting my cache file, I found that the lags and frequent pauses
I always experience after about 3 hours of writing went away, at least
briefly.

I'm running on a IBM X41, 1.5GB ram, 1.6Ghz chip. I shouldn't be getting
long pauses while writing, should I?

 

[Patrick Schmid]

Keep in mind that once you close a notebook, it will be removed from the
cache. So at the end of a semester/year, you can close the notebooks for
the courses of that particular semester/year.

8 GB being a third? That means you assume a 24 GB hard drive? My 6 year
old laptop came with 40, so did my 1 year old tablet (which I just
upgraded to a 100 GB drive).

Do you have another computer, e.g. a desktop? If you do, store the
notebook files on the desktop and you are down to only the cache being
on your tablet (that's my configuration).

Patrick Schmid

 

[Grant Robertson]

Keep in mind that once you close a notebook, it will be removed from the
cache. So at the end of a semester/year, you can close the notebooks for
the courses of that particular semester/year.

This forces me to use a separate notebook for each class. However, most
of my real notes for my classes that are in my majors (Computer Science,
Math, & Physics) will end up in a reference Notebook that will always
remain open for, um, reference, for the rest of my life. So, the bulk of
my OneNote data will be cached for the rest of my life for no good
reason.

(which I just upgraded to a 100 GB drive).

So, you are actually advocating that people spend an additional $100-$300
for storage if they want to use OneNote 2007?

Do you have another computer, e.g. a desktop? If you do, store the
notebook files on the desktop and you are down to only the cache being
on your tablet (that's my configuration).

This is what I will probably do once I get a new desktop. However, for
those without the extra money to have a tablet and desktop or to upgrade
their tablet HDD, this caching thing does effectively cut in half how
much they can put in OneNote even if they never ever intend to share a
single file with anyone.

 

[Patrick Schmid]

(e-mail address removed) says...

This forces me to use a separate notebook for each class. However, most
of my real notes for my classes that are in my majors (Computer Science,
Math, & Physics) will end up in a reference Notebook that will always
remain open for, um, reference, for the rest of my life. So, the bulk of
my OneNote data will be cached for the rest of my life for no good
reason.

The least you can do is to compress via Windows the original .one files.
Due to the cache, you shouldn't experience any performance issues.

So, you are actually advocating that people spend an additional $100-$300
for storage if they want to use OneNote 2007?

No. I was trying to make the point that when ON will be released early
next year, at least 40 GB will be the default for most laptops out then
(on average. I'd expect new ones to be at least 60 or 80). ON wasn't
even a reason I upgraded. My issues were Outlook (1.4 GB for my IMAP PST
and another 1.4 GB for the PST holding all the newsgroup messages), My
Documents (10+ GB), Visual Studio 6 & 2003 (4-5 GB), Office 2003 and
2007 (at least 1 GB), Civilization IV (2 or so GB), etc.

This is what I will probably do once I get a new desktop. However, for
those without the extra money to have a tablet and desktop or to upgrade
their tablet HDD, this caching thing does effectively cut in half how
much they can put in OneNote even if they never ever intend to share a
single file with anyone.

If you have a bigger USB stick (1 GB upwards), iPod, etc, store some of
the notebooks on there. Then you are down to just a cache copy of at
least those notebooks and you can periodically put the USB stick/device
back in to get the cache written to the .one files.
I understand totally the money issue. I wasn't exactly happy when the
100 GB laptop drive was as expensive as the 400 GB normal hard drive I
bought at the same time. I tried for the longest time to avoid upgrading
my hard drive, but eventually my tablet just wouldn't have served my
needs anymore without upgrading. So I reluctantly shelled out the money.
The longest I have gone so far on cache only was 2 weeks back in
December/January with Beta 1. I regularly go 2-3 days on cache only
currently.

Patrick Schmid

 

[Hil]

Remember, you can't just run a notebook on Onenote alone. My Windows folder
alone is over 2GB. Add 500MB for Office, another 3GB for restore/trash/etc
files, 1GB for old email... you get the idea. The point is, new tablet PCs
are still going out the door with 40GB drives. And 8GB is simply too much
space for a digital notebook to be taking up.

I've been a student for many years (undergrad, graduate, and law) and in law
school, I ended up with about 1200 typed pages of notes. If I had written
them out in Onenote, they would probably have ended up at about 10GB. Double
that for the bizarre cache, and that's 20GB. And although it's a nice idea
to think you can just close all the notebooks, when you have to keep opening
them up to look up things, it's awkward and annoying. I'd be better off just
going back to typing my notes out in Word. Which is not particularlly a
great system.

I've also worked as a business manager in a Fortune 100 company. When you
have 50 or so projects going on, you have to have some way of organizing them
all. And please don't say "Project." It has its place, and it's not here
. OneNote, if it worked, would be fantastic. But I can imagine the cache
would leap to 4GB and crash the machine immediately.

Regardless, the cache implementation certainly has some bugs- it should
never get to 4GB when my notebook directory is only 100MB. That's insane.

Finally, I do have a desktop, and yes, I could copy my files to it. But
then what would be the point of my laptop? It's always good to realize you
can archive/backup some of that data to get it off your laptop or desktop,
but the bottom line is that, for a feature that many people don't need, the
extra space could be better utilized for keeping more data at your fingertips
instead of having to pull out those DLTs to find your 2 year old notes.

 

[Patrick Schmid]

Remember, you can't just run a notebook on Onenote alone. My Windows
folder

alone is over 2GB. Add 500MB for Office, another 3GB for restore/trash/etc
files, 1GB for old email... you get the idea. The point is, new tablet PCs
are still going out the door with 40GB drives. And 8GB is simply too much
space for a digital notebook to be taking up.

Get rid of some of the restore points (most are useless anyhow), reduce
the trash, use NTFS compression, figure out which folders you can delete
in the Windows directory, etc. I squeezed prob. 3-4 GB out of my hard
drive just with those measures (and I didn't lose any performance,
restorability, etc).

I've been a student for many years (undergrad, graduate, and law) and in law
school, I ended up with about 1200 typed pages of notes. If I had written
them out in Onenote, they would probably have ended up at about 10GB. Double
that for the bizarre cache, and that's 20GB. And although it's a nice idea
to think you can just close all the notebooks, when you have to keep opening
them up to look up things, it's awkward and annoying. I'd be better off just
going back to typing my notes out in Word. Which is not particularlly a
great system.

As I said in another post, use NTFS compression for the .one files to
reduce the file size of those. It won't cost you any performance.

I've also worked as a business manager in a Fortune 100 company. When you
have 50 or so projects going on, you have to have some way of organizing them
all. And please don't say "Project." It has its place, and it's not here
. OneNote, if it worked, would be fantastic. But I can imagine the cache
would leap to 4GB and crash the machine immediately.

Regardless, the cache implementation certainly has some bugs- it should
never get to 4GB when my notebook directory is only 100MB. That's insane.

You sure you have Beta 2 installed?? There used to be a bug in Beta 1
whereby the cache would just constantly accumulate things until it hit 4
GB at which point ON would crash.
That bug should have been fixed though. If your .one files are local to
your laptop, you can safely delete the cache file btw and just let ON
rebuild it.

Finally, I do have a desktop, and yes, I could copy my files to it. But
then what would be the point of my laptop? It's always good to realize you
can archive/backup some of that data to get it off your laptop or desktop,
but the bottom line is that, for a feature that many people don't need, the
extra space could be better utilized for keeping more data at your fingertips
instead of having to pull out those DLTs to find your 2 year old notes.

Point is simple. You move the .one files to the desktop and then open
all notebooks on your laptop. Then your laptop will only have the cached
copy of your notebooks. Laptop hard drive space is more valuable than
desktop hard drive space, so if the laptop space need goes down to the
cache only, you get exactly what you want. It's not about archiving or
backing up, it's just making use of the sync feature. This also allows
you btw to install ON 2007 on your desktop and access the same notes
from your desktop.

Patrick Schmid

 

[Hil]

That saves some space, but two things come to mind:

1) you can't really ask the average user to do that. If you do, they'll
just buy a Mac.

2) It doesn't solve the problem with OneNote.

 

[Grant Robertson]

The longest I have gone so far on cache only was 2 weeks back in
December/January with Beta 1. I regularly go 2-3 days on cache only
currently.

So, what's the scoop with keeping your original files on your desktop and
living on only cache on the notebook?

A) How does that work?
B) How do you set that up?
C) How do I get to files that aren't OneNote files that happen to be
stored in my Notebook folders? (I have merged my entire reference folder
with my OneNote reference folder and am slowly working on putting at
least links to all the non-ON files in ON so I can see what I have. Some
of the files I am just printing to ON for instant reference.)
D) What happens if I move files or folders around in ON on my laptop?
E) What happens if I move files or folders around in ON on my desktop?
F) Can I get to the actual files and folders on my laptop or are they
hidden in some mega cache file somewhere?
G) What if I move files or folders around on my desktop using Windows
Explorer? Will that be reflected in ON on my laptop or will that break
the system and cause it to not sync properly?

 

[Ilya Koulchin]

So, what's the scoop with keeping your original files on your desktop and
living on only cache on the notebook?

A) How does that work?
Magic!

B) How do you set that up?

Simply create a share on your desktop and put your notebook in that
share. Then connect your laptop to the same network and open the
notebook directly from the share. You can also go to file->new notebook,
tell it that you'll use the notebook on multiple computers and OneNote
will set up the share for you. The key point is you need to have some
location that OneNote can access on a regular basis from both the laptop
and the desktop.
From then on, any time that your laptop and desktop can connect to each
other OneNote will sync the files (it'll need to be running on the
laptop, but doesn't need to be running on the desktop).
Chris Pratley also blogged about all this recently - see
http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2006/06/07/621692.aspx

C) How do I get to files that aren't OneNote files that happen to be
stored in my Notebook folders? (I have merged my entire reference folder
with my OneNote reference folder and am slowly working on putting at
least links to all the non-ON files in ON so I can see what I have. Some
of the files I am just printing to ON for instant reference.)

OneNote will sync and cache embedded files. Any files that are stored
right next to sections (so that they don't show up in OneNote in any
way) will not be synced though.

D) What happens if I move files or folders around in ON on my laptop?
E) What happens if I move files or folders around in ON on my desktop?

OneNote will remember what you did and will sync up the changes the next
time it gets a chance to sync. It should just work.

F) Can I get to the actual files and folders on my laptop or are they
hidden in some mega cache file somewhere?

You'll have to access them through OneNote - but you can always save the
individual sections locally out of the cache if you need an actual .one
file temporarily.

G) What if I move files or folders around on my desktop using Windows
Explorer? Will that be reflected in ON on my laptop or will that break
the system and cause it to not sync properly?

This too should just work - although in some cases you might end up with
duplicate sections (one in the old location and one in the new location)
if you modify some section on the laptop while moving a folder on the
desktop. The only exception is if you move/rename an entire notebook -
in that case you will need to reopen it from the new location.

 

[Patrick Schmid]

A) How does that work?
Same way as if you sync your notebook with another person. One copy of
the .one files plus the cache on every machine that has a notebook open.
Read Chris Pratley's blog post on this issue:
http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2006/06/07/621692.aspx

B) How do you set that up?

The blog walks you through setting it up for a new notebook. For
existing ones, throw the files on the desktop into a folder you share
via Windows. Then add the notebooks on the laptop by simply using that
share name and wait till the laptop synced the notebook fully. Done.

C) How do I get to files that aren't OneNote files that happen to be
stored in my Notebook folders? (I have merged my entire reference folder
with my OneNote reference folder and am slowly working on putting at
least links to all the non-ON files in ON so I can see what I have. Some
of the files I am just printing to ON for instant reference.)

All embedded files are automatically synced as well. I don't know if ON
checks whether a file is actually embedded into a ON page, or whether it
just syncs all files located in folders containing .one files. If you
use links, then you might want to consider moving your My Documents
folder to your desktop and bringing it back to the laptop using Windows
Offline Files.

D) What happens if I move files or folders around in ON on my laptop?

You can only do it inside ON (except for embedded files which you can
modify via the file system). All changes made inside ON are fully
synced.

E) What happens if I move files or folders around in ON on my desktop?

As long as you do it within ON, all changes are fully synced.

F) Can I get to the actual files and folders on my laptop or are they
hidden in some mega cache file somewhere?

You can only get to your embedded files. The .one files are hidden in
the cache file which is one big file in Documents and
Settings\username\Local Settings\Microsoft\OneNote\12.0. This is the
same file that ON currently creates when it opens your notebooks.

G) What if I move files or folders around on my desktop using Windows
Explorer? Will that be reflected in ON on my laptop or will that break
the system and cause it to not sync properly?

I think those changes are reflected on the laptop.

Essentially, nothing changes from what you do with ON today. If you find
that the files you put into you're my Notebooks folder are also in the
path I showed above, then they will also be there in the laptop/desktop
scenario. ON works always with the assumption that notebooks might be
shared, hence it copies everything to that folder first before using it
(which is the "problem" this thread is about). For example for G, if you
can do it today in ON without breaking it, it will work in the new
scenario as well. All that really changes is that you just don't have
the original .one files on your laptop anymore, hence you need half the
hard drive space compared to today. You'll also get icons indicating
that the notebooks are not local on your tablet. Syncing itself is
extremely detailed, so you can easily edit the same page on both
computers and the changes are merged together (it gets into issues when
you edit the same thing in two different ways on both computers).

Patrick Schmid

 

[Rod Smith]

Do you have another computer, e.g. a desktop? If you do, store the
notebook files on the desktop and you are down to only the cache being
on your tablet (that's my configuration).

I tried doing something like this but a big problem I enouctered was with
the "Send to OneNote" feature when printing.

I was trying to 'print' a powerpoint presentation to ON but kept getting an
error message saying that it could not find a spot to write the new document
... and that I should browse to a page where the document can be inserted. I
tried sending the PPT to an existing ON page as well as making a new page and
sending it there - neither worked. It was as if it was looking for the .one
file in the 'OneNote Notebooks' folder hierarchy (which of course was empty
when I am offline). It just wouldnt allow me to 'print' the document to
OneNote when running from the cache. When I reconnected to the network and
the .one files were once again visible on my file server the Send to OneNote
feature worked again.

In order to Send to OneNote when offline, I had to move the OneNote .one
files back to the local hard disk.

Rod.

 

[Patrick Schmid]

You should change your destination settings for printouts. Beta 2
unfortunately defaults to sending printouts to a new section that is not
kept offline. You should therefore create a new section in a notebook
that is kept offline, and change the rules to send printouts there. You
can change the rules in Tools, Options, Filing Rules. Scroll down to
Printouts.

Patrick Schmid

 

[kisivotinh]

How can I disable the OneNoteOfflineCache.onecache ? It keeps growing
very big in size, (around 4Gb). When it is 4 G, onenote 07 will crash, I
know to rename the file but it's very troublesome as the file growing
fast. I dont want to rename the file every few hours.

*You should change your destination settings for printouts. Beta 2
unfortunately defaults to sending printouts to a new section that is
not
kept offline. You should therefore create a new section in a
notebook
that is kept offline, and change the rules to send printouts there.
You
can change the rules in Tools, Options, Filing Rules. Scroll down to
Printouts.

Patrick Schmid
--------------
http://pschmid.net

[vbcol=seagreen]

:



I tried doing something like this but a big problem I enouctered was with
the "Send to OneNote" feature when printing.

I was trying to 'print' a powerpoint presentation to ON but kept getting an
error message saying that it could not find a spot to write the new document
.. and that I should browse to a page where the document can be inserted. I
tried sending the PPT to an existing ON page as well as making a new page and
sending it there - neither worked. It was as if it was looking for the .one
file in the 'OneNote Notebooks' folder hierarchy (which of course was empty
when I am offline). It just wouldnt allow me to 'print' the document to
OneNote when running from the cache. When I reconnected to the network and
the .one files were once again visible on my file server the Send to OneNote
feature worked again.

In order to Send to OneNote when offline, I had to move the OneNote .one
files back to the local hard disk.

Rod. *