A school leaver’s guide to Microsoft 365 data: what leaves with you and what doesn’t

When a school Microsoft 365 account is closed, students often discover too late that not all the things in “their” account were portable. Email gets forwarded for a few weeks then goes silent. Calendars vanish. Forms responses live on a teacher’s account, not yours. Even Teams chats — which look like personal messages — turn out to belong to the school’s tenant, not the user.

This post is the audit. For each major category of Microsoft 365 data, what leaves with you, what doesn’t, and the workflow to maximise what does. It’s aimed at students who are about to leave, parents who want to help, and IT teams who get the “can I have my files back” email two summers later.

OneDrive — yours, mostly

OneDrive is the one category that’s straightforward. Your OneDrive is your personal file store inside your school’s tenant. It contains every file you saved there yourself, everything Microsoft Apps auto-saved on your behalf, and all the personal OneNote notebooks you created.

What comes with you: every Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, image, and video file. Personal OneNote notebooks (which live in OneDrive as folders containing .one and .onetoc2 files). Anything you saved as an attachment from email.

What doesn’t: files where the original owner wasn’t you (e.g. teacher resources you opened from a shared link — those live in their OneDrive). Files locked by Information Rights Management — they’re tied to your account credentials and stop opening once the account closes.

Workflow: download via mydocs.school for the simplest path. Or use OneDrive’s web download (subject to a 20 GB / 10,000 file / 15 GB-per-file ceiling) or the OneDrive desktop sync app for very large drives.

Before you leave: open every IRM-locked file and save it as PDF. Once your account closes, you can’t.

OneNote — depends on the type

OneNote splits into two categories that behave very differently when your account closes.

Personal OneNote notebooks (the ones you made yourself, by clicking Add notebook in OneNote): live inside your OneDrive. Come along automatically when you download your OneDrive.

Class OneNote notebooks (set up by your teacher, with a section per student): live with the class itself, in the school’s M365 group library, not in your OneDrive. They don’t come along automatically with a OneDrive download, and the OneNote app’s “export notebook” feature doesn’t work for notebooks you don’t own.

The class notebook deep-dive covers the mechanics. Practically: the only reliable way to take your class notebooks with you is a tool that walks the class’s file storage with your delegated permissions and pulls the section group named after you. mydocs.school does this; the OneNote app doesn’t.

Workflow: download via mydocs.school. The dashboard lists every class notebook you’re in and you click once per notebook (or once total, via Download all).

Before you leave: if mydocs.school isn’t on at your school yet, the manual fallbacks are imperfect — Send as PDF loses the section structure, and Print to PDF page-by-page is workable for a small notebook but painful at any scale. Forward your IT team to /onboard — onboarding is about thirty seconds.

Email — not really

Outlook on a school account is the school’s email service. Your messages technically belong to the school, even though they read as personal. When the account closes, mailboxes are usually deleted within the school’s standard retention window.

What you can do:

• Set up forwarding in Outlook on the web: Settings → Mail → Forwarding → Enable forwarding to a personal address. Do this now, while the account is open. Forwarding lasts until the account is deactivated, then stops.
• Notify important senders. University Admissions, exam board correspondence, references — anyone who matters needs to know your new email. Don’t let an offer letter land in a soon-to-vanish inbox.
• Manual export, if your school allows it. Outlook web → File → Export to .pst (Windows desktop only) is the formal route, but most schools disable .pst export at the tenant level. Worth checking.

What you cannot keep:

• Sent items beyond what you saved as attachments somewhere else.
• The address itself. Once the account closes, the address bounces.

Practical advice: assume email is non-portable. Forward what matters, archive any important attachments to OneDrive (which is portable), and update your contacts before you leave.

Microsoft Forms — usually no

Forms responses live in the form’s owner’s account. If a teacher built the form and sent it to your class, the responses sit in the teacher’s OneDrive. You don’t own a copy, even if you filled it in.

If you built a Form (some students do, for a society sign-up or an EPQ survey), then yes, the responses are yours — but the export is through forms.office.com → your form → Open in Excel. That gives you an .xlsx you can save anywhere.

Workflow: before you leave, log into forms.office.com, open every Form you created, click Open in Excel, save the spreadsheet to OneDrive. It comes along when you download.

Microsoft Teams — almost no

Teams chats and channel messages live in the tenant’s compliance store, not in any user’s account. You can’t export them through any user-facing flow. Microsoft does provide a consumer-account “Export your data” at account.microsoft.com/privacy, but it’s designed for personal Microsoft accounts and is usually restricted on school tenants.

What you can keep:

• Files you uploaded to channels — those live in the channel’s SharePoint-backed file store. You can copy them to your own OneDrive while you still have access and they’ll come along.
• Recordings of meetings you joined where the recording was saved to your OneDrive (the default for some configurations) or where you have the link.

What you can’t keep:

• The chat history.
• Files in channels where you weren’t given OneDrive copy-out permissions.

Practical advice: before you leave, browse Teams channels, find anything you want to keep, and Save a copy to OneDrive. From there it comes along normally.

Calendar — no

Your school calendar is part of Outlook and is non-portable for the same reason: it lives in the tenant. You can manually note recurring events that matter — if you’re still in the same university friend group, the Friday social — and recreate them in your personal calendar, but there’s no export.

Contacts — usually no

Outlook contacts in a school tenant are similarly non-portable. If you keep important contacts there, copy them out manually. The longer-term lesson is to keep personal contacts in your personal Microsoft account or Google contacts, not in the school account.

Sharepoint sites and class libraries — case-by-case

If your school uses SharePoint sites for class material (some do), the contents are owned by the school, not by you. You can read them while you’re a member of the class, and you can copy individual files you have rights to into your own OneDrive while you still have access. The site itself doesn’t come along.

Privacy and the legal frame

Under UK GDPR your school is the data controller for everything in the tenant. Practically:

• The school can offer to delete data on request (sometimes useful — some students prefer their account go cold immediately rather than linger for 90 days).
• The school must provide a Subject Access Request response if you ask for one — this is the formal route to copies of data you can’t self-serve, though in practice they’re likely to point you at the same self-serve flows discussed above.
• mydocs.school operates as a data processor for the school. Files stream Microsoft → backend → browser without retention; we don’t hold file content. The full picture is in our privacy policy and the IT administrators page.

Summary table

| Data type | Comes with you? | How | |---|---|---| | OneDrive files | Yes | Download via mydocs.school or OneDrive web | | Personal OneNote | Yes | Inside the OneDrive download | | Class OneNote | Yes (with the right tool) | mydocs.school per-class download | | Email | No | Forwarding while account is live; archive attachments early | | Forms (your own) | Yes | Manual export to Excel from forms.office.com | | Forms (you filled in) | No | Owned by the form creator | | Teams chats | No | Save individual files to OneDrive while you can | | Calendar | No | Manual transcription of recurring events | | Contacts | No | Manual copy-out | | SharePoint sites | No | Save individual files to OneDrive while you have access |

What to do this term

If you’re leaving in summer:

1. Set up email forwarding now. Five minutes, lasts until your account closes.
2. Download OneDrive and OneNote. Use mydocs.school if your school is on, or the manual route otherwise. Both class and personal OneNote, both formats.
3. Export any Forms you created.
4. Walk through Teams and save attachments-you-want into OneDrive before they go.
5. Note any recurring calendar events you want to keep.
6. Update your important contacts with a new email address.

Twenty minutes a week for a month. Compared to losing five years of school work, that is a strong trade.

Schools and IT teams

If you’re an IT admin reading this and your tenant doesn’t have a leaver-data tool wired up, the gap is real and students notice it. /onboard gets your tenant on mydocs.school in about thirty seconds, with a 30-day, 5-seat free trial that’s long enough to test with one cohort. We sign a DPA on request — see /for-it-administrators for the technical details and /for-schools for the procurement view.