The complete school-leaver data checklist

If you're leaving school, college or university this term, here's the checklist. Read once. Do it. Forty-five minutes of work for years of payoff.

Before your last term ends

The earlier you act, the less rushed it is. The ideal window is the last fortnight of formal teaching, before exam season starts.

• [ ] Confirm with your IT team when your account will be deactivated. Don't assume. Ask in writing if you can — a follow-up email helps you remember the date.
• [ ] Note the date in your phone calendar, with a one-week-before reminder.
• [ ] Identify what you actually want to keep. Don't try to download everything thoughtlessly; do think about your OneDrive, your OneNote class notebooks, your personal OneNote notebooks, any portfolio work, any email worth keeping.

Download OneDrive

• [ ] Sign in to onedrive.live.com (or use mydocs.school if your school is onboarded).
• [ ] If the account is small (under 5 GB): select all, click Download, save the zip.
• [ ] If the account is large: either use mydocs.school (no size cap), do folder-by-folder downloads (manual but free), or install the OneDrive desktop client on a personal computer and sync everything down.
• [ ] Move the downloaded zip out of the Downloads folder and into a permanent "school archive" folder. Mac Downloads / Windows Downloads / Linux ~/Downloads is where things get lost.

Download OneNote

• [ ] Class OneNote notebooks — open each in OneNote, try File → Export Notebook. If refused (which is common for class notebooks because you don't own them), use mydocs.school or download the raw .one files from SharePoint if your school's policy allows.
• [ ] Personal OneNote notebooks — File → Export Notebook works for these because you own them. Save as .onepkg per notebook.
• [ ] Test-open one of the exported .one or .onepkg files in OneNote on a personal Microsoft account, just to make sure they actually work. Don't discover six months later that the export was corrupt.

See Export OneNote class notebooks and Export personal OneNote for detail.

Handle email

• [ ] Set up forwarding to a personal address (Settings → Mail → Forwarding in Outlook on the web) for future emails. Note: some schools disable external forwarding.
• [ ] For historical email: export to PST via Outlook for Windows (File → Open & Export → Import/Export → Export to file → Outlook Data File). Works on Windows only.
• [ ] Update any external services that have your school email — GitHub Education, Spotify Student, LinkedIn, Adobe Creative Cloud Education, Office 365 ProPlus on personal devices, Microsoft Learn, etc.
• [ ] Tell important contacts your new email address. Particularly people you might want to stay in touch with — teachers who wrote you a reference, dissertation supervisors, careers advisers.

See Export school Outlook email for the detail.

Handle Teams and SharePoint

• [ ] For each Teams channel that mattered: open Files tab → Open in SharePoint → download the files you co-authored.
• [ ] Don't try to export Teams chats — they aren't cleanly exportable. Take screenshots of any threads you genuinely want to keep.
• [ ] For shared SharePoint sites: download specific documents you contributed to. You can't take the site itself, only copies of files.

Save your contacts

• [ ] Outlook → People → Manage → Export contacts as CSV.
• [ ] Open the CSV in Excel / Google Sheets, clean it up, import into a personal contacts manager.

Archive logistics

• [ ] Two copies in two locations is the safer default. One on your personal laptop, one on an external hard drive or in a personal Google Drive / Dropbox / iCloud.
• [ ] Organise the archive into a sensible folder structure. Suggested layout:

  /school-archive
    /onedrive
    /onenote-class
    /onenote-personal
    /teams
    /sharepoint
    /email
    /contacts
  

• [ ] Add a README.txt at the root noting the date you exported, what's included, and any caveats (e.g. "OneNote exports may need importing into a personal Microsoft account before they open cleanly").

Optional but useful

• [ ] Convert your important Office files to PDF for archive purposes. PDF format is extraordinarily stable; .docx and .xlsx less so over a decade. See Converting OneDrive files to PDF.
• [ ] Save key conversations from Teams as screenshots if they were genuinely useful.
• [ ] Note your university or future institution's IT services page in your contacts, so you know who to ask if you suddenly need something from your old school.

What you don't need to do

• You don't need to delete anything from your school account. The school will handle that when they deactivate.
• You don't need to make a formal subject access request to get your work back. SARs are for records the school holds about you (reports, attendance, etc.), not for the curriculum work you produced.
• You don't need to ask permission to download your own work. It's yours.

If you've already left and didn't do this

If your account is still active, do it now. Today. The cheapest moment is always sooner rather than later.

If your account has already been deactivated:

• Email the school's IT team and ask. The answer is sometimes yes during the soft-delete window.
• Ask teachers, classmates, society leaders for copies of specific things they might have.
• Once hard delete has run, the data is genuinely gone.

A note for parents reading this

If you're a parent helping your child through this, the share-friendly version of this checklist is the parents page. The shorter student-facing version is for-students. Forward whichever is closer to fit.