Restore notes from a backup

If you back up your notebooks before you lose or delete important information, you can restore notes if you ever need to.

Important:  Restoring notes is a valuable tool, but you'll have to set up automatic backups or manually back up your notebooks if you want to restore them later.

2016, 2013, 2010 2007

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1. Click File > Info > Open Backups.

2. In the Open Backup dialog box, double-click the folder of the notebook you want to restore, select the notebook section you want, and then click Open.

   OneNote now displays the Open Sections area, where you can review the pages in the section you just opened from your backup files.

3. To restore notes, do either of the following:

   • To restore the entire backed-up section, right-click its section tab and then click Move or Copy.

   • To restore only specific pages from the backed-up section, right-click the page tabs you want and then click Move or Copy.

4. In the Move or Copy dialog box, select where the backed-up section or pages should be placed, and then click Copy.

5. When your notes have been restored, right-click the backed-up section and click Close.

6. Re-select your original notebook from the Notebooks list to continue working in it.
    

Note:  When you're restoring notes from a backup, the Move command in the Move or Copy dialog box won't be available. This prevents you from ever accidentally deleting any parts of a backup that you might need again later.

Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 automatically creates backup copies of your notes at intervals you can customize. You can restore notebook sections or entire notebooks by using these backup files.

For each section that you restore, OneNote creates a new section in your current notebook with the name Section Name (On Date), where Section Name is the name of the original section and Date is the date the section was last saved.

1. On the File menu, click Open Backup.

2. In the Open Backup dialog box, in the Backup folder, double-click the notebook folder that contains the file or files that you want to restore.

3. Select one or more backup files to restore, and then click Open.

   Tip: To select more than one file at a time, hold down CTRL and click each file that you want.