Ask Paul: August 31 (Premium)

It's the last day of August, so here's another lengthy round of Q & A to start off the weekend.
Career alternatives?
ggolcher asks:
I know of your success with Thurrott.com (and the SuperSite before that), and your great career in tech journalism. Have you ever considered branching out into other areas? And furthermore, have you ever tried previously to start your own business?
Not sure what to say about the successful nature of my career. :) I think of it more along the lines of just keeping at it. Anyone can start a blog or a podcast, for example. The trick is not stopping after two weeks.

But I will say that I love what I do. And that the big difference between what I do now---write about personal technology---and what I did before is that what I do now does define me in many ways. When I was working at a bank, or whatever, before that, I explicitly understood that what I was doing outside of work was more important, more central to who I was. This is kind of a "work/life" balance thing, I guess.

Today, the things I do outside of work don't really define me anymore, though I do of course have interests. And I've thought, from time to time, about turning those pastimes into something more public-facing. But I don't feel like I have much to offer there, for the most part. I do spend a lot of time on developer training, but I'm not ever going to become a professional developer again, most probably. I'm interested in certain self-help topics, minimalism, personal finance, nutrition/weight loss, and so on.

I've never really tried to start a business, no.
OneNote Online and backups
harmjr asks:
Can you point me to OneNote Online (Consumer) on line back up policy? ... Any suggestions on how to back up the OneNote Online files?
Because OneNote notebooks are stored in OneDrive, I assumed they were subject to the same backup/version control functionality that you get with other document types. But looking at my own notebooks in OneDrive (which I keep in Documents > Notebooks), I see that Version History is not available for that document type.

Is this a problem? I'm not sure. I know that OneNote has its own version history functionality. And in several years of sharing notebooks (like the one for Windows Weekly) with others with edit privileges, I've never encountered any data loss. (You can see this in OneNote by navigating to View > Deleted Notes.)

In any event, I suppose the simplest thing you could do is sync the folder with your notebooks to a PC and then use File History or some other backup solution on that.
Microsoft vs. consumers
christian.hvid asks:
I know this is a Google forum these days, but I'd like to toss in just one more Microsoft question if I may...
A Google forum? I write about personal technology. And I have a strong Microsoft background, so what I write is disproportionately about Microsoft, not Google, if anything. Anyway....
A few weeks back, Mary Jo made an interesting remark about M...