One Note File Size - Inserting Documents as background pictures

[Andre Sousa]

I'm a bit concerned with the space a document inserted as a picture occupies,
and I noticed that when I insert a Microsoft document as a picture and remove
it (by deleting the page) the space it occupied previously is not freed-up
(even after performing an "optimizing section files").

In this example I had a 104 kb word file and a 426 kb section (the *.one
file), when I inserted the document as a background picture, the *.one file
jumped to 1.859 kb !!!, then I deleted the page where it was inserted and it
reduced only to 1.853 kb and not the original 426 kb.

I have made several test, I also tried by printing the document rather than
inserting it has picture (using One Note Image writer tool) and I got the
same problem, but in both cases sometimes the OneNote files goes back to the
original size.

Has anyone noticed that? are there any tricks to optimize space and avoid
having your Onenote growing so fast and for inserted pictures to occupy less
space?

Regards
Andre

 

[Benoit Barabe \(MS\)]

Unless you need the space immediately, you shouldn't worry about files not
shrinking immediately when you remove content from them. As you keep using
the file, OneNote will reuse that space. Even if you run optimize, space is
not recovered right away as we keep some information in the file "a little
longer" to increase reliability in case something goes wrong.

However, if you need the file to be as small as it can, you can use
Save->As - which will create a clean copy.

Hope this helps,
Benoit.

 

[Andre Sousa]

Thank you Benoit for your answer, but I seem to me missing something, I have
Saved As I also try makinge copies of the folders and saving elsewhere, but
the ones in which I had the problem (not always and that's the thing which is
bugging me) refuse to shrink to their original size.

Another think which concerns me is the fact that a 104 kb word file occupies
more than 1.400 kb space in one note when inserted it as picture, and since I
rely a lot on inserting documents as pictures I'm afraid to have my notebook
(already 50 Gb) growing out of control, and some of the sections already need
a couple of seconds to open (which seems an eternity).

Any suggestions on space management which could help?

Regards
Andre

 

[Benoit Barabe \(MS\)]

Hmm. I am not aware of any case where the file couldn't shrink doing a
Save->As after having removed a picture. However, you can try to select one
(or a few) pages at a time, and use File->Publish Pages, using file type
..one (which is similar to Save->As really, but allows you to select which
page(s) exactly). If you can identify a given page that doesn't have any
picture yet it's Publish to .One is very large, I would be interested in
taking a look at it.

In term of speed, the only controllable aspect I can think of is to change
the number of document pages inserted per OneNote page. It is a setting
under Tools->Options, Editing, Maximum number of document pictures to insert
on a OneNote page. Having less large images per page should help the
performance. (This assume you're using the insert document feature and not a
powertoy.) The number of page per section shouldn't have a large impact on
the performance of loading it if the file is on the local hard drive, but I
find it convenient to limit the number of pages per section and number of
section per folder just from an organization standpoint.

As for the file size, the inserted document being an image, there isn't much
that can be done at this point. I'm sorry I can't offer a solution for this.
We have a few ideas on how to make this better and will consider it for the
next version.

Benoit.

 

[flibbertigibbet007]

The power toy that is being used I belive creates a JPG, maybe a bitmap file
for the image. Which is strictly a bitmap image, and can take up more space
if the image size is large. If there was a way to print with a power toy to a
text or vector style, you may have the ability to use less space.
Don't expect anything to make somthing go back to its original size by
deleting an image out of the file. There may be other stuff that is left in
that is not visible to the user. Image size data, image type... maybe a
checksum or two. I don't know, but i do know that it'll keep the program
working well.
Third of all, get more memory for your computer, sounds like you need it
anyway.

-James

 

[Andre Sousa]

Benoit,

Thank you for input.
In fact, after your answers I noticed that if I save->as the Page (or
section) individually (or use the Publish pages option) it goes back to the
original size. What I did was a full copy of My Notebook folder to an hard
drive, and in this case the size of all folders/pages remained unchanged.
By the way the section where I have the problem is completely empty (it does
not even has any page) but it still has 832 kb (in this case I use one of the
powertoys to print a page and not the Insert functions of MS).


Regards
Andre

 

[ApeMan]

Getting more memory is not an option for me because the limit is not on my
computer but on my portable device (PPC) which I use to transport by Notebook
between home and school. It has limited space and it would really suck if my
Notebook got so big that I couldn't transport it anymore...that would defeat
the purpose of using MS OneNote in the first place!

(OneNote is supposed to be more convenient that carrying paper around, right?)

ApeMan

 

[scrubber]

That is not a satisfactory solution. The same happens when you move pages
around. I had a large section and moved its pages to other sections. The
'cleaned-out' section is still the same size!!! (6MB) If I have to "save-as"
every section (file) that I rearrange, I will be all day "saving as" and then
deleting/renaming my old/new sections. I am still getting used to OneNote
and am trying to refine my folders/sections to make best use of it without
getting buried in too many levels.

Are other people also having the problems with too much material or too many
notes/pages/sections?

Thank you and I look forward to some other ideas

 

[Erik Sojka (MVP)]

I'm a heavy user of OneNote and I never check the file size. It's
irrelevant to the operation of OneNote (from the user's perspective).
Don't worry about it!

I just checked, and all of my notes, included printed documents, etc.
total about 45MB. I'm also in the middle of my end-of-year-and-prepare-
for-2006 cleanup, so I probably have a lot of empty space which hasn't
been reclaimed. That's 45MB out of a 20GB hard drive. I'm not woried
about running out of hard drive space due toheavy use of OneNote.

BTW, the concept of not immediately reclaiming "whitespace" is an ancient
one which probably goes back to the first RDBM systems developed by our
caveman ancestors. As long as storage space is otherwise available, it's
highly inefficient to immediately compress and defragment a file. It's a
concept used in many types of products, including databases, and email
servers.

 

[Lora]

I agree that file size is not an issue for OneNote. Along this line, I add
250-300 pages of text per week, plus dozens of 300 page PDF textbooks and
25-30 page articles are constantly imported to markup while reading. The
file size is 2.2 GB and speed for loading, searching, and scrolling is just
as fast as the day I started using it.

Layne Heiny
(Using Lora's Machine)

 

[scrubber]

Thank you for the nice reply but it does become a problem if you backup to a
USB drive and it runs out of space. I have tons of notes by now and I am
constantly trying to rearrange them to find a way to make OneNote easier.

The search feature is nice but I have been logically arrange the information
in like folders/sections. I still havenot found a good way to use OneNote as
the information gets large. The sections got rather large and it got too
tedious reading down through them. I have been trying to organize them into
folders and sections but that has it's drawbacks (for instance, when you try
to open just one section, it opens up all them in that folder and you again
have the tediius job of stepping through a lot of unwanted info.) I am used
to Info Select and was trying to make OneNote work but it may be too soon.
Maybe I should wait for version 2??

Anyway, moving the info around trying to arrange it so it is easier to find
related info has caused the files to all become too big to copy to a USB
drive. So I understand your point but all languages do 'garbage collection'
at some point whether at the moment or later, they still do it.

Computers are fast so the point about inefficiency is moot. Aren't computers
supposed to make things easier on us? Or are we suppoesed to change our
workstyles to accomodate the way some progrtammer decided to code his program?

Those caveman RDBM systems you speak of still run rings around Access and
SQL in terms of speed and capabilities. So do not be too quick to put them
down.

Thank you.

 

[Erik Sojka (MVP)]

Obviously, if space is at a premium (in your case you're attempting to
run/back up OneNote to a USB drive) then you should do what you can to
save space. The options under Tools | Options | Open and Save should
help if you set them such that OneNote will frequently optimize.

BTW, the tongue-in-cheek cracks about the cavemen RDBMS keeping the
whitespace until needed was intended to be a compliment to the concept.
It's been around for years, and it makes sense for MS to re-use this
good, efficient concept in OneNote, as it does wth SQL and Exchange and
Outlook PST files.

If you want advice on how to organize your notes, it may be simpler to
start a new thread

 

[rseeders]

Do we know what the true Limit of the .one files are? I hear very large
capacity, but I am curious what the individual one files will top out at.

Rick

 

[GMGoldenberg]

I have had the same experience with inserting large images and printing pdf
files to ON 2003 with no loss of performance or speed. But when I do this in
ON 2007 Beta 2 TR, as I scroll down a page with images on it, ON freezes for
a few seconds.
Am I doing something wrong, or is this a known issue in ON? Is there a way
to fix it?
-Gabriel