saving OneNote notebooks on hard drive and simultaneously on Skydrive

Question

G’day, I love OneNote but there is one thing I hate: it’s one or the other, not both (i.e. I want to save the notebook on my computer but ALSO have it synced online). I DO NOT like the idea of just relying on a cached copy if something goes wrong, I want to have a notebook folder on my computer (which is automatically backed up to an external drive) AND I want it all backed up and accessible online. Can this be done?

Why do I want this done this way? well, I run Win7 and Office 2010 in parallels desktop on my 15" MacBook Pro - I am currently saving my notebooks to the Mac's Documents folder. If I save (share) them online then cannot seem to be able to save them on the mac either. I"m not happy with them just being on Skydrive with only a cached copy as a backup (why? because some of my friends have had their live accounts shut down by Microsoft without explanation, and it's been a pain in the neck to get them reactivate, I don't want to rely on Skydrive just in case this happens to me). Suffice it to say I have lots of reasons for wanting to do it this way so does anyone have any clues on how this might be done?

Answer 1

NTFS provides a functionality called symbolic link kind of like a hard-link (Not a shortcut) you can place links to your Notebooks folder in your Backup Folder which will then automatically sync. Here's a utility that can create Junctions for you: Junction

To create a junction c:\Skydrive\MyNotes for "c:\My Docs\NyNotes":

Create Directory:

C:\Skydrive>md MyNotes

Create junction:

C:\>junction c:\Skydrive\MyNotes "c:\My Docs\MyNotes"

Now everything in MyDocs\MyNotes is also (technically) in Skydrive\MyNotes - And automatically synced!

Here's a right-key click solution for the problem, no command line required: NTFSLink

Answer 2

Tried the hardlink suggestion and the local copy is not updated, whether you use the hardlink or not. OneNote bypasses the original file once it is synced online and simply uses the cache to update individual changes to the online version making both the original and the hardlinked version useless after the online sync has been turned on.

As far as I can tell, the closest you can get to a local copy is relying on the backup copies. You can set these to save automatically with choices from every 1 minute to 6 weeks.