“Lost” your SkyDrive OneNote files on your Windows Phone? Here’s the workaround

Shortly after yesterday’s post on the new updates to SkyDrive on Inside Windows Live, reports started coming in about “lost” OneNote files when trying to access them from the Office Hub on Windows Phones.  According to a new blog post on Inside Windows Live today, they’re not “lost” after all, writes SkyDrive PM Omar Shahine:

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.

Shahine goes on to point out a workaround for getting your OneNote files to show back up on your Windows Phone, basically by resetting Office on the phone.  Unfortunately this will delete any documents stored only on your phone, so be sure to back them up.  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.

While we’re not sure we fully accept that “the Office Hub got confused” is much of an excuse, and having to reset Office seems a bit extreme for what seems to be a failure to properly redirect URLs, hopefully this will allow you to get your OneNote files back on your phone.  Hey, it happens.