[ms office - o365] Backup and Restore of OneNote Class Notebooks

[ABirch_BGS]

Just wondering if we are the only school experiencing problems with this.

 

We are using Teams and increasingly teachers are making use of their Class Notebooks. They are being used in assignments, for collaboration and also general classwork. Some of these Class Notebooks are vast with a class of children and all subjects sections, they can easily run into thousands of pages.

If page content is accidentally deleted, it is easy to go back to an earlier version. The problem arises when pages are accidentally deleted. This ha happened for us where staff have accidentally deleted students work. There is no versioning on sections, to restore deleted pages.

According to Microsoft guidance, deleted pages can be restored from the authors OneDrive:Recover deleted Class Notebook files from the OneDrive Recycle bin - Office Support (microsoft.com). In our experience, this does not work if a teacher deletes the page that they distributed and then the student added content to. The deleted pages do not go into either the teacher or the students OneDrive and there is nothing in the OneNote/Notebook recycle bin. It disappears into a blackhole. This seems to be worsened by the fact that a Class Notebook is a consolidation of content from several places. Some content is in the underlying Teams SharePoint stored in Site Contents, other content is in Site Assets and the actual students work hidden in their OneDrive!? This makes impossible to restore from backup (unless anyone on here knows a way). We have Barracuda Cloud-Cloud backup for our MS365 but there is no way it can cope with restoring this.

Why on earth Microsoft see this as acceptable is beyond me? All the content needs to be in one place so that elements or the whole thing can be easily restored. There is a user voice around this here. Please add to it if you have experienced this issue: Ability to EASILY restore student deleted pages and Sections in Class Notebook – Welcome to OneNote and Sticky Notes Suggestion Portal! (uservoice.com)

 

For the time being I have advised staff that pupils should draft work in separate files, Word, excel, whatever and save to OneDrive. They should only then add that into classnotebook and as such they have a backup. Some won't do this as it is easier to just write straight into Class Notebook and it is difficult for some content to be drafted. How are your teachers using it?

 

There is then the complexity of accessing the content next year for multi-year and exam courses, when SDS will recreate the Teams sites in the summer . That's for another thread though!

 

I would be grateful for your experiences, feedback and any workarounds for backing up and restore.

[jtotheb]

Just wondering if we are the only school experiencing problems with this....

 

It's not much consolation, but you're not.

 

Along with everything else there's the inconsistencies that comes with how the Notebook is accessed. At least the web version gives you the no nonsense "Deleting this is permanent" warning. In the OneNote Windows 10 app? No warning at all!

 

NetApp's Office 365 SaaS backup can do Teams and Class Notebooks, but even that has some fairly large caveats. For example, it can only restore down to the section level - not individual pages within a section.

[ABirch_BGS]

It's not much consolation, but you're not.

NetApp's Office 365 SaaS backup can do Teams and Class Notebooks, but even that has some fairly large caveats. For example, it can only restore down to the section level - not individual pages within a section.

 

This wouldn't really help for us. I can understand how it does that as the section names are stored in SharePoint but the actual notes are elsewhere, associated with the user but perhaps in blob storage. No use at all if it cant recover the pages though.

 

I have spent some more time on this today. User backups of the Class Notebooks seems to be the answer: Save a copy of a Class Notebook or Staff Notebook - OneNote (microsoft.com) No way we can assure they are doing this regularly though, no administrative controls.

[jaminben]

Has anyone had the following happen after removing a student from the Team?

 

In your case, since you have removed the student from the original class team, the student's notes will be removed automatically, I'm afraid I have to tell you that, once the notes were deleted, they cannot be recovered.

 

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/msteams_tfe-msteams_noteb-msteams_clanoteb/transferring-classnote-from-one-team-channel-to-a/5ceec0fa-8d9c-41eb-88df-599e4b589c9b

Edited March 25, 2021 by jaminben

[jawebber]

Hi all,

Sorry to drudge up an old thread, but we're in the same situation here and find that OneNote's restore options are terrible, but the system is being used more and more by teachers and pupils at our school.

 

We were looking at Barracuda, but they don't backup OneNote files, and so we're left with the situation that an accidental deletion of a pupil in a team, or a pupil swiping a few times on their iPad means they lost all of their work!

 

All of our staff have manually had to untick "Disable History for this Notebook" through the Windows 10 app on every one of their Teams created classes, but that 60-day restore system is only useful if the deletion is spotted in the time period.

 

Any thoughts on a system that ​does​ backup OneNote Class Notebooks in a Cloud-to-Cloud system?

 

Much appreciated,

 

James