Comparison · Manual export vs mydocs.school
Doing it by hand vs not.
The honest version: the manual path is real, it's free, and it works for small accounts. Here's where the lines are.
| Manual export | mydocs.school | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Free for the student (school pays £1.20 per leaver / 60-day window) |
| Time to export OneDrive | Minutes for small drives; hours of fiddling for large ones | One click, streams in the background |
| OneDrive web limit | 20 GB / 10,000 items per zip | Streams without the cap |
| Class OneNote export | Refused by Microsoft (you don't own the notebook) | Yes — your own section group, as raw .one files |
| Personal OneNote export | Yes — per notebook, manually | Yes — bundled with everything else |
| Outlook email | PST export via Outlook for Windows | Not covered — use the manual path for email |
| Time end-to-end | An afternoon, with patience | About a minute |
| Audit trail for the school | None | Yes — searchable from the admin dashboard |
When manual is fine
If your school OneDrive is under 5 GB, you didn't use class OneNote much, you have time to do it folder by folder, and you'd rather not involve another tool — manual is fine. Use the OneDrive web download for files, do per-notebook OneNote exports for the personal notebooks, and accept that class notebooks are mostly going to be screenshot-only.
When manual hits a wall
- OneDrive over 20 GB. Microsoft's web download splits silently or fails. You end up doing folder-by-folder downloads tracking which ones you already did.
- Class OneNote. The OneNote app refuses to export notebooks you don't own. The class owns them. There is no clean manual path here.
- Multiple notebooks, deadline pressure. Each per-notebook export is a few clicks, takes a couple of minutes, and tends to spread across the last week of term when you have other things on your mind.
Practical recommendation
If your school is onboarded with mydocs.school, sign in and use it. It's free for you and finishes faster than reading this page. If your school isn't onboarded yet, either send them the request-access link or do the manual export now and ask the school to onboard for next year's cohort.
Common questions
- Is the manual path ever the right choice?
- Yes — if your school OneDrive is small (under 5 GB), you don't use class OneNote much, and you have an afternoon to spend. The manual path costs nothing and uses only Microsoft's built-in tools.
- Where does the manual path break down?
- Three places: OneDrive over 20 GB (Microsoft's web download cap), class OneNote (which Microsoft tools refuse to export because you don't own the notebook), and the time cost when you have multiple notebooks and a deadline.