Why you should take your school documents with you.

Your school account is borrowed, not yours

When your school provisioned a Microsoft 365 account for you, they gave you a licence to use a corner of their tenant — not ownership of the data inside it. The instant you leave (after the academic year ends, when you transfer schools, when you graduate), the IT department deactivates your account. Most schools have a retention window of a few weeks before the data is permanently deleted; some go faster.

Once that happens, every essay, every PowerPoint, every spreadsheet, every OneNote class notebook, every photo of a whiteboard, every marked-up Word doc with your teacher's comments — gone. Not archived to a shared drive somewhere. Gone.

What's actually in there

It's easy to forget how much you've put into your school account over five or seven years. A typical final-year student's OneDrive has somewhere between one and ten gigabytes spread across:

• Coursework drafts and final submissions — every version of every essay, project, investigation and lab report.
• OneNote class notebooks — your handwritten notes, teacher feedback, worked examples, exam prep.
• Personal OneNote notebooks — revision guides, flashcards, mind maps, journals.
• Presentations — every PowerPoint you made for a class talk, an open evening, a society pitch.
• Spreadsheets — data analysis from Geography fieldtrips, Physics practicals, Maths projects.
• Photos and scans — whiteboard captures, scanned worksheets, Art portfolios, Design Technology sketches.
• Email attachments — anything a teacher sent you that you saved, including reference lists and feedback PDFs.

When you'll wish you still had it

• University application portfolios. Art and Design courses sometimes ask for sketchbook scans or design process evidence going back two years. Engineering open days like to see your final-year independent project. You can't produce evidence you no longer have.
• Re-using your own writing. A strong essay you wrote a year ago about Hamlet is exactly the kind of thing your first-year university Lit tutor wants you to revisit. A fresh perspective on something you already explored is a shortcut to a strong essay.
• Picking up where you left off. If you're continuing a subject at university, your school notes are a better revision starting point than any textbook because they're written in your own voice, in the order you found them confusing.
• 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) are the strongest evidence you have.
• Dissertation hindsight. Every student who's ever written a third-year dissertation has, at some point, 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.

Why this is harder than it should be

You might think: surely Microsoft makes it easy to download my own files? They do — for OneDrive, more or less. They don't for OneNote. The OneDrive web download has a 20 GB / 10,000-file ceiling you can hit if you've been busy. OneNote class notebooks are a separate problem entirely: they don't live in your OneDrive at all, the OneNote app won't cleanly export your section, and “Send as PDF” loses the notebook structure entirely.

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.

How mydocs.school helps

We're a single-purpose tool: sign in with your school Microsoft account, click “Download all”, get a clean zip of everything. Specifically:

• Your full OneDrive, with personal OneNote notebooks bundled in as their underlying .one section files.
• Every class OneNote notebook you appear in — but only your own section group. Teacher pages and other students' sections never enter your zip.
• Original Microsoft formats preserved (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx, .one, .pdf) — open them in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, or in any equivalent app on your personal computer.
• One streaming download — no folder-by-folder clicking, no per-file permissions to wrestle with.