OneNote for Windows 10 reached end of support on 14 October 2025. Microsoft's published date, stated as honest context. It is in the past — there is nothing to rush, only something to finish.

Two OneNote apps shipped on Windows for years and were easy to confuse: the app that came bundled with Windows 10, and the long-running desktop OneNote. The bundled one is the one that retired. The desktop one continues to be supported, is included with Microsoft 365, ships with Windows 11 and is also available from the Microsoft Store.

If you are reading this because a machine has been sitting in a cupboard, or because you have just inherited someone's old laptop, the situation is entirely recoverable in most cases. Here is the order to work in.

What end of support actually changed

Nothing reached in and deleted anything. Support ending is about the software:

  • Updates stop, including security updates, bug fixes and new features.
  • Creating, editing and syncing from that app are no longer supported.
  • Microsoft's guidance is that existing notes can still be opened and viewed in it.

That last point is worth reading carefully. “Can still be viewed” is a courtesy, not a plan. The real risk was never the calendar date; it is the ordinary events that follow it — a laptop is wiped, a new PC arrives, a Windows upgrade removes the app, or the machine simply dies. Any of those is the day the notes become genuinely hard to reach. That is what makes finishing the tidy-up worth an hour of your time.

Step 1 — find out where your notes actually live

Everything downstream depends on this, and it is the step people skip.

If your notebooks synced to OneDrive or SharePoint, you are in good shape. The authoritative copy is in the cloud. Sign in at onenote.com, or in the supported desktop app, and confirm that every notebook and every section within it is present. Do not confirm by memory — open them.

If a notebook was never signed in or never synced, this is the case that needs care, and it has a wrinkle. The Windows 10 app kept its content in a local cache in its own internal layout, not as loose .one section files sitting in a folder. So searching the disk for *.one may legitimately return nothing even though the notes exist inside that app.

This is the fork in the road, so we will be blunt about it. If your notes are only inside the Windows 10 app's cache, then .one section-file tooling — ours included — is not the right instrument. OneNote Rescue reads .one section files; it does not read that app's cache, and we would rather tell you that here than take your money and disappoint you.

For a cache-only situation, the route that works is to get the app to hand the notes over while it still opens at all: see step 2.

Step 2 — if the old app still opens, get the notes out through it

While the app runs, it is the easiest exporter you will ever have. In rough order of value:

  1. Sign in and sync. If you can attach the notebook to a OneDrive account and let it sync, the problem solves itself — the notes become cloud notebooks that the supported desktop app opens normally.
  2. Use the in-app migration. Microsoft built a guided experience to move users from the retiring app to the supported desktop app. If it is offered, take it.
  3. Print or export to PDF, section by section. Unglamorous, entirely reliable, and it produces something readable in twenty years with no OneNote at all. For a small number of notebooks this is a perfectly respectable answer.
  4. Copy and paste into a document. Last resort, but it beats losing the content.

Do this before wiping or recycling any machine. Once the disk is gone, the options narrow sharply.

Step 3 — hunt for loose .one files anyway

Even on a machine that mostly used the retired app, ordinary section files are often lying around from an older desktop OneNote install, a restored backup, or a notebook someone copied off a share. Worth ten minutes:

  • C:\Users\<account>\Documents\OneNote Notebooks\ — the default home for local notebooks.
  • C:\Users\<account>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\16.0\Backup\ — the desktop app's automatic backups, in ordinary .one form. Older installs use 15.0, 14.0 or 12.0.
  • A full-drive sweep: dir C:\*.one /s /b from a command prompt, including any external drives.

Our guide on where OneNote files are stored has the complete list of paths, including the Mac ones.

Step 4 — check the cloud safety nets before concluding anything is lost

  • OneDrive and SharePoint version history keeps earlier versions of each section file. If a section syncs but looks wrong, an earlier version may be intact.
  • The Notebook Recycle Bin holds deleted pages and sections; Microsoft documents the retention window as 60 days.

Step 5 — make the result durable

Once the notes are somewhere supported, spend the extra twenty minutes that makes this the last time you have to do it:

  • Keep a copy in an open format — PDF or HTML — alongside whatever OneNote holds. Formats come and go; a folder of readable pages does not need an app to be maintained.
  • Keep the original files too, unchanged, in a clearly labelled folder. Storage is cheap and a future tool may do better than today's.
  • Write a short README.txt next to them saying what they are and where they came from. In five years, or for whoever inherits them, that note is worth more than the files.

Where a rescue tool fits — and where it does not

To restate the boundary plainly, because it is the useful part of this page:

  • Loose .one section files that nothing will open — this is what OneNote Rescue is for. It reads your own file locally, read-only, and recovers page titles and note text to plain text, a readable HTML notebook and a JSON report. Nothing is uploaded. The app’s only online action is checking your licence key with Lemon Squeezy; your .one file and everything recovered from it stay on your machine. It runs on Windows and on macOS, so a file rescued from a Windows PC can be read where it is.
  • Notes only inside the retired app's cache — not our tool's job. Work through step 2 instead.
  • Notes safely in OneDrive — you need no tool. Open them in the supported desktop app and carry on.

Honest scope for the case where it does apply. OneNote Rescue recovers page and section titles and note text. From a OneDrive-format section it also writes the embedded images out as real files next to the notebook — along with any other embedded file whose type it recognises by its file signature — each with its SHA-256 recorded in the report. From a classic desktop revision store, embedded files are noted in the report but not extracted in this pass. Ink and handwriting strokes are noted, not converted to text, and any object it cannot identify is listed as present and not extracted rather than guessed into a file. Rich formatting and the exact page hierarchy are simplified into readable text. Nothing is ever decrypted or bypassed: password-protection markers are flagged in the classic revision store, and are not detected in the OneDrive-format container in this pass. Your original file's bytes and timestamp are untouched — the source is copied to a temporary location and only the copy is read.

Supported operating systems: Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit), and macOS 10.15 or later. One purchase covers both, so you can recover the files where they already are — no copying them to another machine first.

The best outcome on this page is that you finish at step 2 and never need us. That is a good day's work either way.