SkyDrive update causes “lost” Onenote Documents on Windows Phones–here’s how to fix it

LiveSide.net reports that the recent (welcome) update to SkyDrive has resulted in OneNote users on Windows Phone being told their documents have been lost, a rather scary prospect if you do not have a recent backup.

It turns out that things are not that bad after all, but that the change in the service has resulted in the older references to the documents being out of date.

SkyDrive PM Omar Shahine writes:

I wanted to address an issue related to the SkyDrive release yesterday. For any of you who are using a Windows Phone, you may have noticed that if you had previously used the Office hub to view any of your OneNote notebooks or Office documents, you may have received a message that the items were deleted from the server, or could not be downloaded.

Your items have NOT been deleted from the server.

What happened is that the URLs for the documents have changed, and this has confused the Office hub into thinking they were removed.

To rebuild the references on Windows Phone Shahine posted a workaround, but as this resets the office hub it means documents not backed up to the cloud will be deleted.  Shahine recommends emailing the documents to yourself:

Important note: When you reset Office, it will delete your local phone documents. It will also remove any pinned items from your home screen, so you’ll need to pin them again afterwards.

1. Go to the Office hub on your phone, and if you don’t have copies elsewhere, email any existing documents on your phone to yourself, so that you have a copy.
2. Go to Settings.
3. Go to the Applications pivot.
4. Select Office.
5. Tap the Reset Office button. (If you get a message that Office could not be reset, reboot your phone and try again).

Once Office is reset, your files and notebooks should open properly from SkyDrive.

The error exposes an issue with Windows Phone in general – poor back-up facilities, meaning if something catastrophic was to happen, any information not in the cloud, which could include things as mundane as game progress saves (which may still involve many hours of effort) to your whole SMS history, which is of course not replaceable, could disappear in a blink of an eye. Given that no system is infallible we need a workable backup solution (and not one that leaves files tens of gigabytes big on your hard drive each time) relatively urgently.

Do our readers agree? Let us know below.

Via LiveSide.net