How do I recover OneNote for Mac folders from a Time Machine backup?

Thank you for all of your recommendations. Unfortunately, after trying these steps I could not recover any files, as I could not get OneNote to work after performing the steps described.

With what seemed like no options left, I decided to take my old hard drive back to the computer technicians that had installed my new hard drive. I asked them to see if they could get One Note to work using my old hard drive.

On my old hard drive, the technicians were able to see the missing OneNote folders. They were able to determine that Onenote on the MAC had not synchronized with OneNote in the cloud, resulting in the folders that I had worked on not being uploaded.

Using my OneNote cloud password, they were able to upload the folders from the old hard drive to the cloud. After that, I have been able to retrieve the folders from the cloud and work locally using OneNote. I was so thankful!

Thank you again, for doing your best to help me!

OneNote 2016 and newer appears to only save using OneDrive and only has a locally cached version on your computer. They don't offer the ability to save a local copy as that's only a Windows feature.

The most likely issue you are running into is that you're signed into the wrong Microsoft account. Check to see if you have multiple accounts and if you use an account with a custom domain name, see if signing in with the Work/School option instead of the Personal option works. You should try signing in using your web browser and visiting onenote.com or office.com and picking OneNote.

The location of the cached local files appears to be at this location below:

~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.onenote.mac/Data/Library/Application Support/Microsoft User Data/OneNote/

However I suspect it's a simple matter of being signed into a different Microsoft account.

You could try to recover your data using Time Machine Backup. Chose the backup that is closest in time to when you lost it. Enter Time Machine and select the backup that's closest to the time you lost the data. In that backup select the folder you want to restore and click on the restore button.

If you still can't find this folder or the files you can use a data recovery app to recover deleted files. There are several apps available for this purpose but none are cheap. I successfully used Stellar Date Recovery to recover some files I accidentally deleted. This application has a free trial period which you can use for this. There are others as well. I'm not associated in any way with Stellar Recovery software. It's just the one I tried and it worked.