Sync OneNote Notebooks to/on SkyDrive

I've got OneNote running on all computers in our house, using it all the time with several people and computers.

The only drawback: I want to keep the copies of OneNote in sync without having to run a dedicated server myself. Right now one of my computers has a folder share, where all others sync to, but this is highly impractical since the computer is not always running.

So my question is: is it possible to put the notebook files on a (private) SkyDrive Folder and have all the computers sync to there? This way all computers could keep in sync whenever they got access to the web.

Can this be done? and, of course, How?

[Update] Maybe I should not have taken knowledge about OneNote as granted: OneNote uses a propietary file format, but has a very good in-file-syncing, working on network shares. Generic 'just sync the complete file' won't be useful at all, because I'd just have 'file has changed on server and on client' conflicts all the time.
The sync needs to know OneNote files and be able to sync the content - eg. OneNote itself needs to sync the files, not some generic sync tool.


Objection noted, but according to one of the developer's blog, OneNote 2007 natively syncs to a WEBDAV server, so you can host the master notebook there and sync to many machines.


I just tested OneNote 2010's native ability to sync with office.live.com and it seems to work nicely. When working on OneNote notebooks you are always working against a cached copy - this is the case even when working against a local notebook. In the case of syncing with Office Live, you make make changes to your notes as usual and they update the local cache. They sync in the background to their copy on Office Live. Since the sync is native, your changes are nicely preserved from any computer where you make them, or from the web if you choose to do it from the browser.

You create an Office Live-synced notebook by selecting the Web option upon new notebook creation.


Kind of. Thing is, unless it has changed since I last looked, SkyDrive doesn't have anything in place to automatically sync files. There are 3rd party tools like SDExplorer that do, though.

However, I've done what you're after both with DropBox and Windows Mesh. With those two, you designate a folder (or folders) to keep synced and then save your OneNote stuff in that folder. The rest just happens magically :-)

[Update 9/7/2015] My original answer so out of date now. Skydrive became OneDrive and OneDrive rocks at hosting shared OneNote notebooks. A lot has changed over the past few years!


OneNote 2010 has enhanced sharing capabilities. Just save your book in a Dropbox folder and then continue working. I checked and it is possible to modify the same note simultaneously in two computers and it gets updated at the same time in both. If the changes become in conflict, then a new section will be created with the deconflicted situation.