Personal OneNote notebooks in your school account.

What counts as a “personal” OneNote

A personal OneNote notebook is one you created yourself, in your own OneDrive — not a class notebook your teacher set up for the whole class. Common uses:

• Revision notes you typed up before exams.
• A diary or reading journal.
• Plans for an EPQ, NEA, or extra-curricular project.
• Practice essays you wrote outside of class.
• Recipe books, photo collections, song lyrics — anything personal.

Some students never make a personal notebook; others have ten of them. If you opened OneNote and clicked Add notebook at any point, you have a personal notebook.

Where they live (this is the key bit)

Unlike class notebooks, personal notebooks live inside your own OneDrive. Each notebook is a folder, usually under /Notebooks/ or /Documents/, and contains:

• One .onetoc2 file (the table of contents).
• One .one file per section.
• Subfolders for any section groups you created.

Because they live in your OneDrive, they come along for free when you download your OneDrive. mydocs.school's OneDrive zip already walks into these folders — your personal OneNote section files end up in the zip as raw .one files alongside the rest of your drive.

Why the OneNote app sometimes can't list them

OneNote uses a Microsoft service that has a hard limit on how many items it can list at once. If your OneDrive has more than 5,000 OneNote items (notebooks + section groups + sections combined, plus any other files in the same OneDrive), OneNote stops listing notebooks. You may see a message like “OneNote couldn't open this notebook” on the dashboard.

Heavy users — anyone with five years of layered class notes — sometimes hit this. There's nothing you can do inside the OneNote app to work around it. But there's another way in.

The two ways mydocs.school finds them

Because personal notebooks live in your OneDrive, we have two independent ways to get them — and we use both:

Way 1 — through OneNote

Lists your personal notebooks by name and shows them on the dashboard. You can click a notebook's “Download” button to get just that one. This is the route that hits the 5,000-item limit. If it does, the dashboard shows a banner explaining and falls back to Way 2.

Way 2 — through OneDrive

The Download my OneDrive (and Download all) buttons walk your entire OneDrive and zip everything. They treat OneNote folders as ordinary folders, so the underlying .one and .onetoc2 files come along automatically. This route doesn't go through OneNote, so the 5,000-item limit doesn't apply.

Even if the dashboard shows a “couldn't list your notebooks” banner, your personal notebooks will be in the OneDrive zip — just inside the OneDrive folder structure rather than itemised by name.

Opening them after download

The .one files in your zip open directly in OneNote desktop on Windows (drag into a local notebook). On Mac, you'll need to upload them to a personal OneDrive first — see the support guide for the full walkthrough.