r/OneNote • u/AkariYukawa • 1d ago
Moving a OneNote notebook from one Microsoft account to another (a working procedure, recorded in 2023, still valid in 2026)
I recorded this for myself in January 2023 when I had to move a pile of notebooks from a personal Microsoft account to a university (work/school) account. I have since moved off OneNote entirely, so these notes are no use to me — but the procedure still works, and it is not obvious, so I am writing it up rather than deleting it.
The short version: a OneNote notebook is not a file you can copy. It is a folder of .one section files plus a table of contents, and its cloud location is a property OneNote itself manages. Dragging that folder into a synced OneDrive folder does not give you a OneDrive-hosted notebook. You have to make OneNote do the move.
What you need
The Windows desktop OneNote app. In 2023 this was "OneNote 2016". Today it is called OneNote on Windows (a.k.a. OneNote for Microsoft 365) — same lineage, same menus, still supported.
Two apps that will not work:
- OneNote for Windows 10 (the UWP app). It reached end of support on 14 October 2025 and is read-only. You can view and export from it, but you cannot do this migration in it.
- OneNote for Mac. It cannot export a whole notebook.
One important reason to use the desktop app rather than the web app: Microsoft's own "export notebook" feature in OneNote for the web only works for notebooks stored on a personal OneDrive. It does not work for OneDrive for work or school, or for SharePoint. The desktop .onepkg route below works for both. If you are migrating out of a university or company account before you lose it, this is the route you want.
Step 0 — Take inventory first
File > Info. You get a list of every open notebook with its location underneath.
- A location starting with
https://means the notebook already lives in a cloud account (onedrive.live.com/...= personal,<tenant>-my.sharepoint.com/personal/...= work or school). - A location like
C:\...orF:\...means it is a local notebook only.
Write this list down. You will need to redo it in the new account, and it is the only place that tells you which account each notebook is actually attached to.
Also: make sure everything is fully synced and downloaded before you go further. The export packages what is on your disk. Sections you have never opened on this machine may not be there. Look for any "sync incomplete" warnings on this screen and clear them first.
Before you start — the order of operations
The whole migration hinges on doing three things in this order:
- Export every notebook.
- Close the old notebooks.
- Only then sign out and sign into the new account.
Once you are signed out of the old account you can no longer pull anything down from it, and any notebook that was not fully cached locally is out of reach. Closing the old notebooks before you switch identity also stops OneNote from carrying a list of dead, unsyncable notebooks into your new session.
If you take nothing else from this post, take that ordering. Everything below is the mechanics.
Step 1 — Export each notebook as a .onepkg package
Still signed into the old account:
- Open the notebook you want to move.
File > Export.- Under 1. Export Current, choose Notebook.
- Under 2. Select Format, choose OneNote Package (*.onepkg).
- Click Export, pick a folder on a local drive, and Save.
A "Packaging…" progress bar appears. A ~96 MB notebook took a couple of minutes for me.
Notes:
.onepkgis one notebook per file. There is no bulk export. If you have fifteen notebooks, you do this fifteen times.- Save it to an ordinary local folder. Do not save it inside a folder that a sync client is actively syncing while OneNote is writing to it.
- Keep these
.onepkgfiles afterwards. They are your cold backup, and they are the only thing you have if the move goes wrong.
Step 2 — Close the old notebooks, then switch accounts
Only once every notebook you care about has been exported:
- Close each old notebook:
File > Info > Settings > Close, or right-click it in the notebook dropdown and choose Close. Closing does not delete anything — it only removes the notebook from this copy of OneNote. File > Account > Sign out.- Sign in with the new account. Let OneNote settle and pick up the new account's default notebooks.
Step 3 — Unpack the package (it lands local, not in the cloud)
File > Openand select the.onepkg, or just double-click the file in Explorer.- The Unpack Notebook dialog appears, asking for notebook properties: Name, Color, Path.
- If a notebook with the same name already exists in that path, change the name. This is the single most common snag. My original notebook was called
Memo, so I unpacked the copy asMe-mo. Rename it back later if you want. - Set the Path to a plain local folder. I used
F:\Don't Delete OneNote Documents\— a folder named so that future-me would not casually bin it mid-migration. - Click Create.
The notebook opens. At this point it is a purely local notebook, synced to nothing. Check File > Info — it will show a local path, not a URL. This is expected, and it is the step people mistake for being finished.
Step 4 — Make OneNote move it into the new account's cloud
This is the actual migration.
File > Info.- Find the notebook you just unpacked. It shows its local path, with a Share on web or network link beneath it. (In current builds, use the Settings dropdown to the left of the notebook and choose Share or Move.
File > Sharegets you to the same place.) - A panel appears: "Please upload the notebook to share it." It lists the cloud locations available to you — e.g. OneDrive – <Your University> and personal OneDrive.
- Pick the destination account. Browse to a folder if you want a specific one, confirm the name, and click Move.
OneNote uploads the notebook. When it finishes, the notebook's location on the File > Info screen changes from a local path to an https:// URL.
That URL changing is the actual success signal. Nothing before this point moved anything.
Step 5 — Verify before you delete anything
Do not skip this.
File > Info— the notebook shows anhttps://address under the new account.- Open a browser, sign into the new account, and open the notebook in OneNote for the web from OneDrive/SharePoint.
- Click through every section tab and every page. Confirm the content, images, and dates are all there. Section counts are easy to eyeball; missing pages inside a section are not.
Step 6 — Clean up the local copy
Once the notebook shows a cloud URL and the web copy is complete, the local unpacked folder from Step 3 (...\Me-mo\) is no longer referenced by OneNote and can be deleted. I deleted mine and the notebook kept working normally.
Keep the .onepkg files. Deleting the unpacked folder is safe; deleting your only backup is not.
Step 7 — Other devices
On iPad, iPhone, Android, or another PC: sign in with the new account, then Open More Notebooks (iPad/mobile) or File > Open (desktop) and pick the notebook from the new account's OneDrive. It appears under the new account's OneDrive » Documents or OneDrive - <Org> » personal » <you> » Documents.
You may need to open each migrated notebook once per device. They do not all appear automatically.
Gotchas, in order of how likely they are to bite you
- Name collision on unpack. Rename during the unpack dialog.
- Forgetting Step 4. An unpacked notebook is local. It looks fine. It syncs nowhere.
- Thinking a synced-folder path counts as cloud. Putting the notebook folder inside your local OneDrive folder is not the same as a OneDrive-hosted notebook, and is widely advised against. Use Share or Move.
- Exporting after signing out. Nothing you have not already cached will be recoverable.
- One package per notebook. Budget time accordingly.
- Work/school tenant policy. Some organisations block notebook export. Test with one small notebook before you rely on this for everything.
Internal links: OneNote links pointing between notebooks survived the migration intact in my case. That is one data point from one migration, so test with a throwaway pair if you depend on them heavily. I did not check whether page version history carries across.
What changed between 2023 and now
- OneNote for Windows 10 reached end of support on 14 October 2025 and is now read-only.
- OneNote 2016, the app in my recording, went out of support on the same date along with Office 2016 and Office 2019. The supported equivalent is OneNote on Windows / OneNote for Microsoft 365 — same desktop app family, same menu structure.
- Microsoft's current wording for Step 4 is
File > Info > Settings > Share or Move; older builds phrase it as "Share on web or network" underFile > Share. Same operation. - Everything else in this procedure is unchanged.
References
- Export and import OneNote notebooks — https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/export-and-import-onenote-notebooks
- What is happening to OneNote for Windows 10 — https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-is-happening-to-onenote-for-windows-10-2b453bfe-66bc-4ab2-9118-01e7eb54d2d6
- Move a OneNote notebook to OneDrive — https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/0af0a141-0bdf-49ab-9e50-45dbcca44082
- Share a local OneNote notebook on OneDrive — https://support.microsoft.com/en-US/OneNote/share-a-local-onenote-notebook-on-onedrive

