The sad state of my old notes

October 25, 2022
microsoft onenote demicrosoft onedrive linux self-hosting

Back in the good old days, back when I was naive, I used OneNote for some notes. I actually used OneNote for the great deal of my college notes, always thinking it'd be easily accessible. However, in my journey away from the Microsoft-centric world to owning my data, I discovered I can't open all of my notes anymore.

Back in the not-to-distant past, I was watching the news around Windows 11 and started to grow concerned over the not-to-distant future. Windows 11 is a dragon sleeping that would be easier to face now rather than when it wakes up. It doesn't take much to predict the future on this: (1) Microsoft will probably force an upgrade from 10 to 11, and (2) my machine can't run Windows 11 because I don't have TPM 2.0 support, which means as time goes on, the risk of Microsoft deciding to revoke Windows 10 licenses for being "out-of-support" will probably grow substantially, and it's a risk I don't want to worry about. My CPU, an Intel Core i7-5820K released in 2014 Q3, is a little old, but it's not that old, and it's definitely faster than most workstation computers I use. I don't plan to buy a new CPU any time soon - especially in this economy. And before you say it:  Yes, I know we can bypass the TPM 2.0 requirement, but at what risk and for what purpose?

So, what am I to do? Just wait until Microsoft arrives with the delima in a couple years while continuing to pay them money for OneDrive? No. I decided to be pro-active and switched to Linux now. Right now, I'm running Linux Mint as my daily driver. After a while, this prompted me to take control over my digital life on more fronts. I was using OneDrive for data synchronization, which doesn't have a great way to work on Linux Mint, so I started searching for an alternative.

I started moving my data from OneDrive to a self-hosted NextCloud. I began re-organizing my files into my cloud, experimenting with different hosting strategies, and finally settled on a solution. It does what it needs to do, which is automatically synchronize and backup my files between my devices and permitting me to share files to anyone, for a price that is currently better than OneDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox. It's not perfect, but I don't need to worry about Microsoft deciding I need to be deplatformed for the current trendy reason.

I began pulling my files off of OneDrive and moving them to my auto-synchronizing locations on my desktop in the new format I wanted. Everything was going pretty smoothly. I was moving various documents, images, PDFs, etc – all of which my PC could open easily. The cloud was pulling it in and saving a backup, and my phone could easily and securely access anything I needed. I still have somethings to work out, but so far, I'm impressed with NextCloud.

Then the time came for my OneNote files. I used OneNote quite extensively - in fact, nearly all my college notes are in OneNote. It was time to de-OneNote my notes. I needed an alternative note system, and that's when I came across Obsidian. It seems pretty good - and I like the idea of semi-structured notes. The semi-structure let's you put in links, tags, and you can view these links and tags through a graph. Here's an example from their homepage: None Obsidian's Home Page Example

For the actual notes, the files are just plain text files (e.g. you can open in notepad) formatted using MarkDown, so I can write/store my notes like this:

Since MarkDown is a widely used syntax that transforms to HTML - even a more widely used syntax, any text I store in it will always be accessible and safe, and could probably be opened a very long time from now, perhaps when my kid is going through school and I need to see if I had any notes on something.

For the most part, this was easy. There's a special OneNote section in OneDrive that has all my notebooks, and I just began copying and pasting the contents in the new format I wanted.

However, as I was copying my data from OneDrive, I noticed something interesting. I had some OneNote notebooks laying around that weren't viewable in the special OneNote section. OneDrive couldn't open it or preview it - and my Linux machine definitely doesn't know what to do with it. It's was a collection of various .ONE files that appeared to match sections or tabs. I tried opening it in OneDrive, and it told me it didn't know how to open it. Well, that's weird. It's obviously a OneNote file - and I could tell it was from my high school years, and I vaguely remember what might be in it. Why can't it open?

Apparently there's a very simple answer. When SkyDrive first came out, I placed my few OneNote documents inside SkyDrive somewhere, because I wanted them backed and accessible from elsewhere. However, later down the road, Microsoft released some sort of special integration with OneNote and SkyDrive/OneDrive that allowed you to "share" OneNote via OneDrive. This placed it in a special area that could be viewed by the browser, but they never went back and let OneDrive open/view notebooks that were already synchronized before that integration. I didn't really know or think about it, and obviously haven't had a reason to check for my ability to open it until now.

So, now I have some very old .ONE files that I haven't figured out what to with it yet. I could go back to my Windows partition, install OneNote, and try opening it, but I consider that path cheating right now. .ONE files are proprietary binary formats, and I'm not aware of any other program that is able to open them easily. I can read the binary and see some plain text directly, but there's probably more to it than that.

Perhaps there's a .ONE extractor somewhere? I don't like the idea of having to go back to Windows just to open some old text notes I had when I was a kid.

I guess if there's a moral of the story - don't assume you own your content, no matter where it is. I know that's a lesson my wife learned recently when Instagram insta-banned her for her account being hacked. If you don't completely own where it is and how you open it, you don't own it, even if it is yours.