OneNote Folder File Size

[Mike]

Is there a limit or a point where a OneNote Notebook will not function
properly. I use the program to mange multiple programs and some notebooks
are 300+ mb and have had no difficulty or sluggishness running. I have seen
comments made regarding OneNote not being a document storage database and
would like to know if I am headed for a disappointment. I am a big fan of
OneNote and recommending it to others as alternative to paper notebooks -
Some current notebooks are 1500+ pages when published as pdf. Any advice on
controlling notebook file sizes?

 

[John Guin [msft]]

check this post for some related info:
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/arch...ance-with-huge-amounts-of-text-on-a-page.aspx.
And a cheap OneNote (startup time) speed boost can be had with a flash
memory device on Vista:
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/archive/2007/07/02/a-cheap-speed-increase-for-onenote.aspx

300MB does not seem unreasonable. Are your notebooks large because of
embedded files or do you have mostly text? There are so many variables here
(OCR turned on, images, ink, text, number of text elements, number of .ONE
files, speed of hard drive, "horsepower" of cpu, amount of memory, etc...)
that it is hard to give advice. Since you are working well at this point,
I'm inclined to not try to tweak your system or otherwise give any advice
that might break your setup.

Are you using OneNote 2003 or 2007?

 

[Steve Silverwood]

Is there a limit or a point where a OneNote Notebook will not function
properly. I use the program to mange multiple programs and some notebooks
are 300+ mb and have had no difficulty or sluggishness running. I have seen
comments made regarding OneNote not being a document storage database and
would like to know if I am headed for a disappointment. I am a big fan of
OneNote and recommending it to others as alternative to paper notebooks -
Some current notebooks are 1500+ pages when published as pdf. Any advice on
controlling notebook file sizes?

One thing about notebooks: a "notebook" is in essence only a folder in
Windows. Within that file are several .ONE files, each representing a
section (tab) in that notebook, and THOSE are the files that actually
hold the data. If any single one of those .ONE files gets to be
exceedingly large, performance -can- be impacted.

One of the best ways to mitigate this is to defrag the files. A
useful tool for this is Defraggler (just do a search for it, you'll
find it easily enough). This is the ONLY program I know of which will
let you defragment individual files, as well as whole hard drives or
partitions. Obviously, defragging a single file, or a group of files,
is going to be faster than doing a whole drive, so you'll get done a
lot sooner.

Beyond that, you may want to consider breaking up the section into
multiple sections. If you create a new Section Group, and create
sections within that group, you can then break up the overly-large
single section into smaller sections within the group. That makes for
smaller .ONE files within the Group, which could improve performance a
bit.

But do the defrag first. I think that'll do the most to reduce the
problem for you.

//Steve//

Steve Silverwood, KB6OJS
Email: (e-mail address removed)
Web: http://kb6ojs.com

 

[Rainald Taesler]

... A useful tool for this is Defraggler (just do a search for it,
you'll find it easily enough). This is the ONLY program I know
of which will let you defragment individual files, as well as
whole hard drives or partitions. Obviously, defragging a single
file, or a group of files, is going to be faster than doing a
whole drive, so you'll get done a lot sooner.

Thank you so much for this tip!
I immediately downloaded it.
That's something I'd been looking for because the defrag tool built-in
in Vista seems to be not too efficient.
The files of the Indexing systems on my system showed to be terribly
fragemented (the main one with 11.297 fragments.

Thanks again and regards
Rainald

 

[Steve Silverwood]

Thank you so much for this tip!
I immediately downloaded it.
That's something I'd been looking for because the defrag tool built-in
in Vista seems to be not too efficient.
The files of the Indexing systems on my system showed to be terribly
fragemented (the main one with 11.297 fragments.

A message like that makes this whole effort all worthwhile. Glad to
be of help!

//Steve//

Steve Silverwood, KB6OJS
Email: (e-mail address removed)
Web: http://kb6ojs.com