Quick answers.

It signs you in with your school Microsoft 365 account, then lets you download a clean copy of your OneDrive (every file in it) and your OneNote notebooks — both personal notebooks you created and the section group you own inside any class notebook. One zip per source, or one combined zip via the “Download all” button.

For students it's free at the point of use — your school either covers the licence or you're on a 30-day free trial. Schools subscribe at £1.20 per leaver, per 60-day download window — billed annually in GBP. A seat is consumed the first time a leaver starts a download and is held for 60 days, then automatically released.

No. mydocs.school runs in your browser. For OneNote notebooks you have a choice: download the raw .one files (which need OneNote — free on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android — see the opening guide) or use the “Download as HTML” option for a browser-friendly copy that opens anywhere with no install.

Yes — but it's primarily designed for students. Teachers tend to have many more files in their OneDrive after years of accumulated resources, so they're more likely to hit Microsoft's zip and listing limits. The OneDrive sync app is usually the more reliable option for a teacher-sized account — see the support page for the workaround. Class notebook downloads also work differently for teachers — see the teacher question below.

Every file in your OneDrive — Word documents, PowerPoints, Excel sheets, PDFs, photos, videos, everything. Personal OneNote notebooks come along automatically as their underlying .one files. See the full list of formats in our file-types guide.

The section named after you — the one where your own work lives. You get every page in every section, packaged as the original OneNote section files. More on how class notebooks work →

Your full OneDrive (which already contains your personal OneNote) plus every class notebook you can access — all of it scoped to your own section groups. One streaming zip with OneDrive/ and OneNote-Classes/ as the top-level folders.

We don't download email. The Microsoft scopes we ask for are explicitly limited to OneDrive and OneNote — Outlook is out of scope. To take your school email with you, set up forwarding to a personal address before your account is deactivated.

Forms data isn't in OneDrive, so it's not included. If you've created Forms, export each one's responses to Excel from forms.office.com before your account closes — they end up as .xlsx files you can save anywhere.

Teams messages live in a different system again, and we don't access them. Microsoft does provide a separate “Export your data” flow at account.microsoft.com/privacy for Teams content — though it's aimed at consumer accounts and your school may have disabled it.

Once your school disables or deletes your Microsoft 365 account — usually within a few weeks of leaving — sign-in stops working and there's nothing we can do to recover your files. Grab a copy before your last day. Your school IT team can tell you exactly when access is cut off.

Yes — anything larger than 500 MB inside the on-site OneDrive zip. That mostly means video recordings and a few oversized archives. The zip includes a _skipped.txt manifest listing what was left out, and you can fetch those files individually from onedrive.live.com while your account is still active.

For the raw .one download, yes — those are the original files Microsoft uses internally. OneNote is free on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android, and importing the files is two clicks once it's installed (the opening guide walks through it). If you don't want to install OneNote, use the “Download as HTML” button instead — that gives you a folder of HTML pages you can open in any browser. See the next question for the trade-offs.

It's a browser-friendly copy of your notebook produced by an open-source converter. Pros: no OneNote installation needed, opens in any browser, easy to print or share individual pages. Cons: layout is approximate (top-to-bottom flow, not OneNote's free-canvas pages); handwritten ink shows as drawings rather than searchable text; password-protected sections can't be converted. The unzipped folder has an index.html as the entry point. If a section fails to convert, a _skipped.txt file lists which ones — fall back to the .one download for those.

No. Your files stream straight from Microsoft to your computer. They cross our server in transit — that's how the download is packaged into a single zip — but nothing is written to disk, opened, or indexed along the way.

Our logs record which notebook you downloaded and when, tied to your Microsoft account ID, so a school admin can audit usage. They contain no filenames, no page titles, and no file contents. The privacy policy has the full detail.

No. No AI model — generative or otherwise — sees your files, filenames, or page contents. The download is a plain byte-for-byte stream from Microsoft to your computer.

No. Each student signs in with their own Microsoft account and only sees what Microsoft says they have permission to see. For class notebooks, this is checked twice — first by Microsoft's own permissions, then again by our service, which only ever opens the section named after the signed-in student.

No. Files stream from Microsoft Graph through our backend directly to your browser. Nothing is uploaded anywhere else, and we don't use any analytics services that would inspect file content.

Yes. Sign-in uses Microsoft's normal modern login flow — you enter your password on Microsoft's own page (not ours), and any multi-factor prompts your school has set up (Authenticator app, FIDO key, text codes) appear exactly as they do for any other Microsoft 365 service. We never see or store your password, and your school's Conditional Access policies apply to us the same way they do to Outlook or Teams.

Microsoft caps single-zip downloads at 20 GB / 10,000 files / 15 GB per file, and we honour the same limit. For larger drives, use the OneDrive desktop sync app — see the support page for the walkthrough.

That's a Microsoft listing limit — once your OneDrive holds a lot of items, OneNote's listing service stops working. Class notebooks still appear normally, and your personal notebooks come along inside the OneDrive zip as their underlying files, even though they didn't list. More detail →

Class notebooks have a section per student. Teachers don't have a personal section, so there's nothing for the per-student download to grab. Use the OneDrive download instead for material you've put together in your own files, or save teacher pages as PDFs from OneNote directly.

Not until your IT admin grants tenant-wide consent. Forward them to mydocs.school/onboard — the full process takes about thirty seconds and there's nothing to install.

mydocs.school is a verified Microsoft 365 application from Muon Works Ltd. When you sign in, Microsoft shows you exactly what permissions are being asked for — read-only access to your OneDrive and OneNote. For the full breakdown your IT team will want, see the IT administrators page.