Changing the Automatic Backup Time Interval
To have OneNote create automatic backups more frequently than just once a day, do the following:
1. | Click the File tab and then click Options.
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2. | On the left side of the OneNote Options dialog box that appears, click the Save & Backup category (see Figure 1).
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3. | On
the right side of the dialog box, under the Backup heading, make sure
that the check box in front of the first option (“Automatically Back Up
My Notebook at the
Following Time Interval”) is selected, and then click the drop-down
menu next to this option to select a backup frequency that suits you.
You can have OneNote create a fresh backup every single minute or wait
up to 6 weeks between one automatic backup and the next. |
4. | You
must click OK at the bottom of the OneNote Options dialog box to save
your changes. If you click Cancel, OneNote will revert to the previous
settings.
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If you want to completely turn off automatic backups
for some reason, simply deselect the check box labeled Automatically
Back Up My Notebook at the Following Time Interval in step 3. To turn
automatic backups back on after you’ve turned them off, reselect the
check box.
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If you change the interval to make create OneNote the autosavings more often than once per day, maintain in the spirit that you could also want to change the number of whole of helps which are maintained in your file of help. If you keep to prefabricate of just two
backups at the same time, it can severely limit your options of restoration. Lu above for a development of this problem.
Changing the Number of Backups to Keep
Imagine that you’ve set up OneNote to make an
automatic backup of your work every hour on the hour. Although this
might seem like a highly safe option, it might not be. Leaving the
number of backups to keep at just two sets (the OneNote default
setting) means that you might not be able to undo any accidental
deletions or overwritten notes that you might discover some 3–4 hours
after such an error has occurred. After just 2 hours, all of your
backup sets will have been overwritten with those fresh, hourly backups
you wanted, and those new backups will each contain the mistakenly
overwritten notes (or lack the pages that were accidentally deleted).
This would make your two backup sets entirely useless.
To avoid this, remember to also increase the number
of backups you want OneNote to keep whenever you choose to increase the
frequency of your automatic backups. The only cost for doing this is
hard drive space. If you create more backup sets more often, it might
require a significant amount of free space in your backup location.
If you’re backing up to a spacious secondary drive
or network share that’s dedicated to your OneNote backups and nothing
else, keeping a large number of backups shouldn’t be much of an issue.
However, if your notes contain a lot of significantly large
attachments, or a significantly large number of images or audio and
video clips, you might need to first double-check how much space is
needed for each backup set of all your notes. You can do this by
opening Windows Explorer and looking at the file sizes of your
notebooks by checking them in their primary storage location on your
hard drive (typically, in the subfolders found in the OneNote Notebooks
folder, which, in turn, is tucked away in your Documents [or My
Documents] folder).
To increase or decrease the number of backup sets OneNote should keep at any one time, do the following:
1. | Click the File tab and then click Options.
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2. | On the left side of the OneNote Options dialog box that appears, click the Save & Backup category (see Figure 1).
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3. | On
the right side of the dialog box, under the Backup heading, replace the
number shown in the field following the second option (“Number of
Backup Copies to Keep”) with the number of backup sets you want to save
in your backup location. The oldest of these sets will be overwritten
at the time interval you specified in the option immediately above. If
you have the space available for it, you can keep up to a staggering
99,999 backup sets.
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4. | You
must click OK at the bottom of the OneNote Options dialog box to save
your changes. If you click Cancel, OneNote will revert to the previous
settings.
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If you change the number of backup sets to keep
after you’ve had OneNote open for a while, you might see a warning that
your configuration changes won’t take effect until you restart OneNote
(see Figure 2).
In this case, it is highly recommended that you exit and restart
OneNote as soon as possible so that your next automatic backup will be
complete.
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No
magic formula can tell you what you should set your backup time
interval and number of backup sets to. It really depends on the
importance of your notes and how often you may need to recover from
critical mistakes, which is likely to happen more often than complete
data loss due to technical failures. If you have the space available in
your backup location, creating many backups more often may be the best
insurance policy, especially if you frequently work with very sensitive
or mission-critical information. For less serious work, you can
certainly choose to reduce the frequency of your backups, but consider
still keeping a larger number of backup sets than just the two that
OneNote starts out with. The more sets you have available to restore
notes from, the better your chances of recovering exactly those notes
that you cared about and somehow lost or overwrote.
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