Why Year 11 and Year 13 students should download their school files before they leave

If you’re finishing Year 11 or Year 13 this summer, your school Microsoft 365 account has weeks left to live. Not your school career — that part’s nearly done. But the account itself: the OneDrive holding five or seven years of essays, the class OneNote notebooks where your teacher annotated your homework, the personal OneNote where you typed up exam revision at 11pm in May. All of that lives on a school-owned licence, and the moment IT deactivates your account, the whole lot vanishes within a few weeks.

Most students don’t realise until two summers later, when they’re writing a dissertation that overlaps with an A-level essay they wrote and the obvious thought lands: I had this material. Where is it now?

The answer is, almost always, gone.

This post is the case for not letting that happen — and the specific list of things you’ll regret losing.

Why your school account is borrowed, not yours

When the school provisioned your Microsoft 365 account in Year 7 or Year 12, it gave you a licence to use a corner of the school’s tenant. You don’t own the data inside it; the school does, the same way the school owns the textbooks. The instant you leave — the moment after results day for most schools, or some defined date in late July — IT deactivates your account.

Most schools have a retention window. The standard advice from Microsoft is 30 to 90 days. After that, the data is gone. Not archived to a shared drive somewhere. Not waiting on the server in case you ask. Gone.

A small number of schools keep alumni accounts indefinitely. If yours does, congratulations — but ask your IT department directly, because it’s rarer than you’d expect, and it’s not the safe assumption.

What’s in there that you might not realise

Five or seven years of school accumulates faster than you think. A typical sixth-former’s OneDrive holds between one and ten gigabytes, scattered across:

• Coursework drafts and final submissions. Every version of every essay, EPQ, NEA, lab report, personal investigation. If you save your drafts (and most students do, because you redraft), there’s a paper trail of how your thinking developed.
• OneNote class notebooks. The notebook your teacher set up for the class, where they pasted handouts and you typed your in-class notes. Your section group inside it has every page you ever wrote for the subject.
• Personal OneNote notebooks. Revision notes, flashcards, mind maps, exam prep, practice essays. Anything you organised by yourself.
• Presentations. Every PowerPoint for every class talk, society pitch, open evening, group project.
• Spreadsheets. Geography fieldwork data, Physics practical results, Maths project workings, budgeting for a charity drive.
• Photos and scans. Whiteboard captures, scanned worksheets, Art portfolio shots, Design Technology sketches, your mate’s notes when you missed a lesson.
• Email attachments. Anything a teacher sent you that you saved off — reading lists, marked work coming back, reference letters, certificate copies.

You used your OneDrive without thinking. That’s the point. None of it felt important at the time. All of it is going to feel important in two years.

When you’ll wish you still had it

Specific scenarios where alumni come back asking for files that no longer exist:

University application portfolios. Art and Design courses sometimes want sketchbook scans going back two years. Engineering open days like to see your A-level project. You can’t produce evidence you no longer have.

Re-using your own writing. That solid Year 12 essay on Hamlet is exactly what your first-year university Lit tutor wants you to revisit, with a fresh perspective. Re-reading your own argument from a year ago is a shortcut to a stronger essay now. If the file’s gone, that shortcut is closed.

Picking up where you left off. If you continue a subject at university, your A-level notes are a better revision starting point than any textbook because they’re written in your own voice, with your own confusions, in the order you found them confusing. They’re also annotated by your teachers, who knew exactly where the exam board was likely to push.

Resits and appeals. If you ever need to re-submit, appeal a grade, or prove the timeline of your work, the original drafts (with timestamps, with teacher comments embedded) are the strongest evidence you have.

Dissertation hindsight. Every third-year student has had the thought: I wrote something like this in school — what did I conclude? If you don’t have your old notes, the answer is nobody knows.

Apprenticeship and job applications. Showing a 17-year-old version of your work alongside your current portfolio is occasionally exactly what gets you the offer. Not always. But sometimes.

Why it’s harder than it should be

You might think Microsoft makes it easy to take a copy of your own files. They do — for OneDrive, mostly. They don’t for OneNote.

OneDrive’s web download has a 20 GB / 10,000-file ceiling you can absolutely hit if you’ve been in school five-plus years. OneNote class notebooks are a different story entirely: they don’t live in your OneDrive at all. They live with the class itself. The OneNote app’s “export notebook” option doesn’t work on notebooks you don’t own — and you don’t own the class notebook, the class does. “Send as PDF” throws away the structure entirely. You get a flat document and lose links between pages, embedded files, ink layers, and the section structure.

Most students who try to download manually end up with a mess of loose files, broken notebook references, and missing class notes — if they get anything at all.

This is the gap mydocs.school was built to close.

What to actually do this week

If your school is on mydocs.school:

1. Sign in at mydocs.school with your school Microsoft account.
2. Click Download all for one combined zip — your OneDrive + your personal OneNote + every class notebook scoped to your own section group.
3. Keep the zip somewhere you’ll still own access to in five years: an external drive plus a personal cloud (free Microsoft account, Google Drive, iCloud — pick two).

If your school isn’t on mydocs.school yet:

1. Forward your IT team to mydocs.school/onboard. Onboarding takes about thirty seconds and the trial is free for 30 days, with 25 seats included.
2. While you wait, do the manual route: log into OneDrive on the web, select all files, click Download. That gets you most of OneDrive (within Microsoft’s 20 GB ceiling). Then follow the OneNote workaround in our support guide to grab the .one files for personal notebooks. Class notebooks are the hard part — the only reliable route is mydocs.school or printing each section to PDF page-by-page.

A safer long-term plan

Once you have the zip:

• Unzip it. Don’t leave it as a zip — file-corruption-on-disk is a real thing, and you want individual files you can actually open.
• Open one of each format you have. Make sure your downloaded .docx, .pptx, .xlsx, .one, .pdf actually opens on a personal computer. If anything is locked because of Information Rights Management, open it now while your school account still works and save a PDF copy.
• Two backups, not one. External drive + personal cloud. The point is to survive the loss of any single device or service.
• Rename anything cryptic now, while you remember which Untitled.docx was your EPQ first draft. Future-you will not remember.

Twenty minutes this term. Not bothering this term means hoping nothing changes between now and the rest of your life — and the rest of your life is long enough that something will.

Take the twenty minutes.