OneNote is the holder of random bits of information that would otherwise be strewn about my bookmarks, saved files or thrown away and forgotten. It is SO handy. In a lot of ways, it has become the dumping grounds of my life. If I were a college student, OneNote would be my favorite application.

I’m also a big fan of Dropbox.

Dropbox keeps me sane by allowing me to have one set of data spread across multiple computers. It backs up, it versions and is just awesome.

Put OneNote and Dropbox together and you have a match made in heaven.

Well, almost.

Until today, I had one major problem using OneNote with Dropbox.

If I were on a home computer and sent something to OneNote, it would go in just fine. But then if I went to one of my other systems to pull up that content, it wouldn’t always be there. Sure enough, I’d check the file path and find that Dropbox had gotten confused and created a conflicted copy.

If I didn’t realize that something was missing right away and started capturing to my Unfiled Notes from a different system, I’d lose data.

The source of my problem was that I had set all of my systems up to copy to the same Unfiled Notes notebook. This made sense during the setup as of course I want all my Unfiled Notes to be together and accessible in one place. But the more I ran into this conflicted file business, the more frustrated I got.

Today, the solution finally dawned on me:

1. Create a dedicated OneNote notebook for Unfiled Notes.
2. Create a section in the notebook for each computer.
3. Point each system to the appropriate section from Step 2 Under OneNote -> Options -> Save & Backup -> Unfiled Notes Section.

So if you made the same mistake I did in putting all your Unfiled Notes into the same file from different computers, hopefully this fix will help you.

In recent weeks, I’ve started using Dropbox. It’s a nifty little web app that allows you to store crap online. Now, you might be saying to yourself, “Self, that’s not all that great, the Internet is full of people storing crap online; just look at YouTube.” and you’d be right. . .

Except that Dropbox provides a desktop utility that syncs your data to their servers and to any other client you have setup. So what does this mean to you? (They get bonus points for providing cross-platform clients.)

Well, it means you can use it to sync any file across multiple computers of different operating systems simply by saving it.

For instance, you could sync your Firefox profile across your home laptop, your work laptop, your home desktop, your second work computer and for good measure the mac you have at home, but never use. And that’s what I’m currently using it for. I like my Firefox just how I like my Firefox and by having one profile across the multiple computers, I don’t have to install the same extension upgrade 6 times, or repeat the same configuration steps multiple times. It’s very nice.

This is just scratching the surface of what Dropbox can handle.

If you want to test Dropbox, sign up using the link below:
https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTExMjEzNTQ5