New to Obsidian and migrating from OneNote

So I solved the problem the only way possible.

  1. I made sure ALL the notebooks were up to date and synced.
  2. I went into my business account and shared them with my personal account.
  3. For step 2, I had to go into 365 Admin and: 1. Create an external account with my personal email account and verify it, 2. accept it from the personal email account, 3. re-enter my business account and then share it with the personal account. I think I had to mess with Entra on my Sharepoint Access policies to do this (new name for Active Directory).
  4. I went onto my personal email account (switch accounts on your computer’s logon OR open up an incognito browser before trying this; otherwise windows will get confused and you will lose an hour figuring this frustrating error out).
  5. I downloaded the shared onenote notebooks onto my local computer.
  6. I then created a NEW folder on my PERSONAL OneDrive account just for this migration project folder.
  7. I then UPLOADED the unzipped files into this new migration project folder. STEPS 5-7 ARE CRITICAL!!! If you don’t download and re-upload, you will still just be changing the shared OneNote on your companies SharePoint server which is NOT what you want.1
  8. I then tried to imported them.

AND THEN A BIG ERROR OCCURRED on the second attempt when trying to log in. I had to uninstall and reinstall Importer just to be able to log back in. Some error about … TYPEERROR when trying to use the split command. Wish I had written it down for you as feedback. I’ll look later.

Regardless, I could then log back in via Importer to my personal account.

This time, I literally just exported each OneNote while on my Business account, then downloaded them all again and re-upped them to my personal OneDrive account (and yes, they need to be on the OneDrive and NOT your local computer as OneNote hides the data…fun, right?). Then I imported each one with Importer. Evidently it can read the onepkg files too. And this worked.

There were errors because some page titles had a period, space at the end or special character in the title such as "* / " and there are several others. I tried to correct as many as I can but there is no global “find and replace all” in OneNote because OneNote is very limited (at least compared to Obsidian).

It was a nightmare honestly, and I’m still not done. But at least it is something. I’ll forever stick with Obsidian. I never knew OneNote hide our info; I’m guess to preserve function like their across Notebook fuzzy finder or whatnot but still irritating as heck.

Good luck. Be patient. And if you have a lot to transfer like I did…give yourself 3x the time you THINK you will need to get it done.