The Mover.io alternative for students
Mover.io was good. Then Microsoft bought it.
How students can still export their school OneDrive and OneNote work, now that Microsoft has retired Mover.io.
For about a decade, any student could sign in to mover.io and copy their school OneDrive somewhere they actually owned. After the acquisition, that self-service workflow was wound down and then switched off on 31 October 2024. mydocs.school is the self-service replacement — paid for by your school at £1.20 per leaver, per 60-day download window, and you sign in with your school Microsoft account in about ten seconds.
The short version
Mover.io retired for individuals on 31 October 2024. The self-service way for a student to get their school files out of a school Microsoft 365 account disappeared with it. mydocs.school puts that ability back — for OneDrive and OneNote, in one zip.
What Mover.io used to be
Mover was a small Canadian company founded in Edmonton in 2012. It ran a free, browser-based migration service that connected on one side to a source — Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Egnyte, an Amazon S3 bucket, an FTP server, or a personal OneDrive — and on the other side to a destination of the same kind. You signed in, authorised both ends, picked your folders, and Mover streamed the files across in the background. Nothing to install, no admin needed, no IT ticket. By the late 2010s it was around seventy people and it had quietly become the easy answer to a question every school leaver eventually asks: how do I take my work with me?
The timeline
2012
Mover is founded in Edmonton, Canada
A small team builds a cloud-to-cloud migration service that any user can drive themselves from a web browser. The free tier is generous enough to move a student's entire OneDrive.
21 Oct 2019
Microsoft acquires Mover
Microsoft buys the company to plug a gap in its Microsoft 365 onboarding story — making it easier for IT teams to migrate content from Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, and Egnyte into OneDrive and SharePoint.
Feb 2020
Mover migration is rolled out worldwide
The service stays free for Microsoft 365 customers and the public mover.io site keeps running. Self-service for individuals continues to work.
2023–2024
The admin-led side is folded into Microsoft 365
Mover's enterprise features get absorbed into SharePoint Migration Manager, which sits inside the Microsoft 365 admin centre and needs the new Migration Admin role. Useful if you have one; useless if you're a student.
31 Oct 2024
Mover is retired for individuals and students
The self-service mover.io web app is switched off. Microsoft's official guidance now points individuals at the OneDrive mobile app (which only imports into personal OneDrive) or at a generic copy-and-move support article. Neither is a real replacement for what a student needs to do at the end of Year 11 or Year 13.
Ready in ten seconds
Sign in with your school Microsoft account to start your OneDrive and OneNote export.
What students lost when Mover.io was retired
Microsoft kept the parts of Mover that helped Microsoft. The free, self-service, student-friendly side was the part that went away. The official replacements Microsoft suggests are honest about who they serve:
- SharePoint Migration Manager — for tenant admins, inside the Microsoft 365 admin centre. A leaver cannot use this. Their school IT team can, but it's an admin tool, not a per-student export workflow.
- The OneDrive mobile app — imports files from Google Drive or Dropbox into a personal OneDrive. It doesn't help in the other direction, which is what a leaver actually needs.
- A generic support article on copying files between accounts — fine in theory, painful in practice when a student has a 12 GB OneDrive plus three class OneNote notebooks.
Where mydocs.school fits
We picked up the specific workflow Mover lost: a student signs in with their school account, sees their own work, and downloads it. No tenant admin in the loop, no Microsoft 365 destination required.
| Mover.io 2012 – 31 Oct 2024 | Migration Manager Microsoft 365 today | mydocs.school since 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who can drive it | Any user | Tenant admin with Migration Admin role | The student themselves |
| Source | Cloud storage providers + school OneDrive | Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Egnyte, file shares | School OneDrive + personal & class OneNote |
| Destination | Other cloud storage, personal OneDrive | Microsoft 365 (OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams) | The student's own laptop, as a zip |
| Class OneNote support | No | No | Yes — scoped to the student's own section group only |
| Cost | Free for individuals | Bundled with Microsoft 365 admin | £1.20 per leaver / 60-day window, paid by the school |
| Still works in 2026 | No | Yes (but not for individuals) | Yes |
How to export your school work with mydocs.school
- Open mydocs.school and click Download my Docs. The sign-in screen is Microsoft's own — same password as their school account, same MFA and Conditional Access policies their school already uses.
- The dashboard lists every personal and class OneNote notebook attached to their account, with sizes. OneDrive sits at the top with a quota bar.
- One click for OneDrive, one click per class notebook, or Download everything for a single zip containing the drive and every notebook. Files stream straight to the browser — nothing is stored on our servers.
For class OneNote, the export is the raw .one files from the student's own section group only — never teacher pages, never another student's work. That was never a constraint Mover had to think about; class notebooks weren't really its world. It is the load-bearing rule of ours.
For schools who used to point leavers at Mover
If your IT team used to tell Year 11s and Year 13s to “just use Mover.io” in their last week, that advice stopped working on 31 October 2024. mydocs.school is the drop-in replacement for that bit of the leaver workflow: multi-tenant, GDPR-aligned, one tenant-wide consent and every student in your tenant can sign in. The school admin dashboard gives you the audit trail Mover never offered.
Read the school overview or the IT administrator guide for the technical detail.
Common questions
- What happened to Mover.io?
- Microsoft acquired Mover (founded 2012 in Edmonton, Canada) on 21 October 2019. The free self-service web app at mover.io was retired for individuals and students on 31 October 2024. Admin-led migrations were folded into SharePoint Migration Manager inside the Microsoft 365 admin centre, which only tenant admins can use.
- Why does this matter to a student?
- Before October 2024, a Year 11 or Year 13 leaver could sign in to mover.io themselves, point it at their school OneDrive and their personal Google Drive, and copy their work over before their school account was disabled. That self-service workflow no longer exists. Microsoft's suggested replacements either require a tenant admin or only import files into a personal OneDrive — they don't help a student get their work out of their school account.
- How is mydocs.school different from Migration Manager?
- Migration Manager is for IT admins moving content into Microsoft 365 at the tenant level. It needs the Migration Admin role and the SharePoint admin centre. mydocs.school is for the individual student. They sign in with their own school account, see only their own work, and download a zip — no admin involvement, no destination tenant needed.
- Is this a replacement for the admin-led parts of Mover?
- No. If you need to move a whole tenant's content from Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or Egnyte into Microsoft 365, use Migration Manager. mydocs.school covers the other side: the self-service student workflow that disappeared on 31 October 2024.
Pick up where Mover.io left off
Sign in and export your school work, today.
No new account to create — you sign in with your school Microsoft account and your dashboard appears. The first download claims a seat for your school for sixty days, and it's yours from then on.
Sources: Microsoft's acquisition announcement (21 October 2019) and the Mover retirement timeline on Microsoft Learn.