[New method!] How to sync Onyx Boox Note Air 2 handwritten notes with your Google Drive (with OCR)

This article describes an efficient way to sync Onyx Book Note Air 2 (Plus) notes to your PC using Google Drive.

I’ve found the note-syncing method I described in my original post a bit inefficient and messy: while the PDFs did get synced from the device, there was a problem whenever I updated (i.e. added something) to my existing notes.

Although the PDF file updated as expected, the corresponding image files (PNG, JPG) that Dropbox automation created were not updated. Instead, Dropbox created a new folder with all the images for the updated PDF file. I basically ended up with something like:

Dropbox automation saves image files for my Interviews 1.pdf file in the Interviews 1 (1) folder, basically creating duplicate content

TLDR: It’s impossible to force Dropbox to overwrite image files as the PDF gets updated.

I’ve come up with the method below as a workaround for this issue. The new method is more efficient and works much better with Google Drive.

How (and why) it works

This method syncs your Onyx Boox notes to your Google Drive folder as images, giving you the possibility to search the contents using Google’s amazing OCR capabilities.

In the method described in this article, every time the original note is updated on Onyx (i.e. when you add some text to the note), the corresponding image files on Dropbox are also updated — rather than uploaded to a new Foldername (1) in Dropbox, which was the problem with the old method.

This saves you the hassle of dealing with dozens of copies of updated (our outdated) images in Google Drive.

What you’ll need

To make this method to work, you’ll need three things.

1. A little patience to go through the steps
2. A Dropbox account (free)
3. Google Drive
4. Autosync app installed on your Onyx Note Air. You will need to purchase two paid lifetime Autosync upgrades (one-time payments!) which will cost you $20 in total: Sync with Google Drive and Sync with Dropbox. This can be done from the Buy app license menu in the Autosync app on Onyx:

Now, here are the steps:

Step 1. Connect the Air 2 to Dropbox

Create your Dropbox account if you don’t have one. The free version comes with 2GB of cloud storage space — this should be more than enough for handwritten notes.

Next, open the Notes tab on the Boox Air 2 and click the menu button in the top-right corner. Select Sync settings.

Next, click Bind next to Dropbox sync. You will be sent to the browser to log into your Dropbox account. Follow the instructions on the screen and click Allow when prompted.

NOTE: There is really no need to enable the All notes are automatically synced to ONYX cloud option. Onyx servers serve no purpose for this method to work.

This step will add automatic syncing of your notes to your Dropbox account upon closing a note. The PDF notes are saved to the Dropbox/Apps/onyx-knote/noteair2-notepads folder on Dropbox.

Step 2. Enable Dropbox automation for PDFs

Open your Dropbox account in your web browser. Go to the Dropbox/Apps/onyx-knote/ folder and click the three dots icon next to the noteair2-notepads folder. Click Add automation.

There, select Choose an image format to convert files to (either JPG or PNG, it doesn’t really matter).

Next, select Choose an image format to convert files to.

Next, select All supported file types and Save as: JPG (or PNG, it doesn’t really matter).

This step basically enables automatic conversion of all the files in the Dropbox/Apps/onyx-knote/noteair2-notepads folder to images.

• Each PDF file in the folder will be automatically converted to an image file of the same name (JPG or PNG).
• If a note has more than one page, the JPG or PNG images will be automatically saved in respective subfolders of the noteair2-notepads folder.

Note: There is no need to install Dropbox for Windows/Mac. Dropbox will be working in the background to convert the PDFs to JPGs (or PNGs).

Step 3. Install and set up Autosync

Install Autosync on your Onyx device.

Note: Onyx saves the PDF versions of your notes in the /note folder on the Onyx device. However, you’ll need to create a temporary “sync” file on Onyx that will serve as an inermediary between Dropbox and Google Drive. I’ve created a folder in the Onyx root called DropsyncFiles, but you can use a different name.

Now, set up two “folder pairs” in Autosync that will be working in parallel to sync files between your Dropbox, the temporary DropsyncFiles folder, and the Google Drive folder.

Folder pair A

For clarity, I named it “Move files from Dropbox to Onyx”. This folder pair automatically downloads all files from the Dropbox folder /Apps/onyx-knote/NoteAir2-Notepads, saves these files in the DropsyncFiles folder on Onyx, and then deletes the files in the /Apps/onyx-knote/NoteAir2-Notepads on Dropbox.

This folder pair uses the “download then delete” method, which essentially means: “New files in the cloud are downloaded to device then deleted from the cloud. After sync is finished no files are left on cloud side.”

Think about it as Move Files from the cloud to device.

Note: Onyx always saves a fresh pdf version of each your note every time you update it and close it, and then sends it to Dropbox. Then, Dropbox automatically converts the updated pdf to images.

Folder pair A

Also, tick “Delete empty subfolders” to keep things neat and tidy.

Folder pair B

For clarity, I named it “Upload mirror from Onyx to Google Drive”. This folder pair, again, automatically uploads all files from the DropsyncFiles folder on Onyx to your Google Drive (I chose to sent the files to a Google Drive folder named Onyx Notes, but you can use any folder name for that)

This folder pair uses the Upload Mirror sync method, whic means the cloud folder is an exact copy (mirror) of the folder in device.

Here is what happens: all files in the device folder are uploaded to the cloud. Files deleted in device are deleted in the cloud. Changes made in the cloud folder are overwritten. Extra files in the cloud folder which are not in the device folder are deleted.

Folder pair A

Also, tick “Delete empty subfolders” to keep things neat and tidy.

Note: For more on Autosync folder syncing methods, see this guide. Feel free to experiment!

All set up!

And… that’s basically it! All newly created Onyx notes get automatically saved on the Google Drive folder. You can use the Google Drive desktop app and pin the synced folder to your favorites for easy access to your notes on PC.

The Google Drive folder now contains the most up-to-date versions of both the PDFs and images, saved in a separate folder like this:

Let me know if it worked for you and if you have any questions!