School leavers, this is for you.

The thing nobody told you about your school account

When you signed in to OneDrive or OneNote on day one of school, you were given a corner of an institutional Microsoft 365 tenant. The school owns the tenant. You did the work inside it. Those are different things, and the institution has no ongoing obligation to keep your data once you've left.

The standard retention window is 30 to 90 days from the moment IT deactivates your account. After that, the soft-delete grace period ends and the data is gone for good. Schools cannot restore deleted accounts past that window — it's a Microsoft constraint, not a policy choice.

What “school leavers” actually covers

The word leaver gets used differently depending on the country and education system. The pattern is the same in every case: enrolment ends, account closes, work goes with it. The most common situations:

• Secondary school leavers — finishing the last year of compulsory schooling, often around age 16 or 18.
• Sixth-form / college leavers — finishing post-16 study before university or work.
• University leavers / graduating students — finishing a degree, master's, or doctorate.
• Mid-year transfers — moving between schools or institutions before the natural cycle end.
• Staff leavers — teachers and staff moving on or retiring; same Microsoft 365 problem, different file profile. See /for-teachers.

How to use mydocs.school

1. Sign in on the start page with your school Microsoft 365 account. Microsoft handles the authentication, same MFA your school already uses.
2. Your dashboard lists every personal and class OneNote notebook attached to your account, plus your OneDrive. Search and filter as needed.
3. One click per item, or one click for the lot. Files stream straight to your browser. Save the zip somewhere safe — a personal Google Drive, an external drive, your home laptop.

What it's not

mydocs.school is a focused tool. It doesn't do everything a full Microsoft 365 backup service does — and it doesn't need to. Specifically:

• It's not a Outlook email exporter. Email tends to be the easier piece — most institutions let students export PST files themselves, or forward to a personal address. See /export/outlook-email for the realistic options.
• It's not a Teams chat exporter. Teams chats belong to the conversation participants jointly and aren't cleanly exportable on a per-user basis.
• It's not a SharePoint site exporter. Shared sites belong to the institution. mydocs.school only deals with content where you have personal ownership or the relevant scope.

Common questions

Who counts as a school leaver?

Anyone whose school Microsoft 365 account is going to be deactivated because they're leaving the institution. That includes final-year secondary students, sixth-formers and college students, undergraduates and postgraduates leaving university, and teachers moving on or retiring.

Why is this specifically a leaver problem and not an everyday problem?

While you're enrolled, your school holds your data and you can keep working with it. The moment your enrolment ends, the account is on a countdown clock. Most institutions delete data within 30–90 days of leaving — and the data your school holds about you is not the same as the data you can ask for back. The work is yours; the licence wasn't.

Is mydocs.school the only option?

No. You can manually download your OneDrive folder by folder, try to extract OneNote with Microsoft's built-in tooling, or ask your IT team to bulk-export your data. All three are realistic. mydocs.school is the fastest, especially for class OneNote which is hard to get out any other way.