How to Sync OneNote Notebooks on WHS

  The Goal:

To have your OneNote notebooks always available for syncing ANYWHERE – whether you’re inside your home network or connected to the Internet.  The obvious solution would be to store your files on the server in a shared directory and then sync from your clients via WHS (and WebFolders4WHS) however…

The Problems:

• No Backup:  If you store your original OneNote files on the server, they are not backed up everynight (sure, drive duplication should protect them in case of failure but you don’t have the simple file level recovery you get when they are stored on the client and backed up on the server).  OneNote makes it’s own backups and stores them on the clients but in the case of file corruption (which we just experienced) it is possible that recent changed might not be reflected (again, happened to us, OneNote destroyed the previous nights backup trying to repair the problem so the only backup left was three days old). QUESTION: Is there a way to backup folders stored on WHS to itself so we have the easy restore functionality?

• No Access Through Internet:  If, on the other hand, you store all your OneNote files on a network client, those files will be backed up to WHS everynight.  This solution works fine for computers connected to the network but, to the best of our knowledge, there is no way to connect to a network client over the Internet.  So these folders would not be available when you are not connected to your home network.

• Drive Mapping Problems:  To sync OneNote notebooks to a WHS shared folder, one has to map the drives.  We tried doing this with WebFolders4WHS.  We were able to set it up fine but it couldn’t sync.  It tried unsuccessfully to sync but returned permission errors and ended up corrupting the OneNote file (so be careful if you try this).

If anyone knows how to overcome these problems please post a response.  I’ll give it a try and post step-by-step directions for the solution.