OneDrive Data Export: Your Notebooks Stay Behind
Precise limits, honestly published, and tighter than anyone else here. Plus one hard exclusion: OneNote notebooks do not download, and the zip tells you so in a text file.
Exit score: 23 / 30
How hard OneDrive makes it to leave with your data intact, scored against 6 criteria from the vendor's own published documentation. How we score.
| Criterion | Score | What the documentation says |
|---|---|---|
| Self-service | 5/5 | Select files or folders and download, or sync everything locally with the OneDrive client. No request, no admin gate and no build queue for personal accounts. |
| Format openness | 5/5 | Your files in their original formats. Nothing is converted or wrapped, which is the structural advantage every storage product has over every database-backed one. |
| Completeness | 2/5 | Three named exclusions and one of them is absolute: "You can't download OneNote notebooks." Items in the Shared view cannot be downloaded directly, and encrypted files over 4MB are dropped from the zip in some cases. |
| Not paywalled | 5/5 | Downloading your own files is not tier-gated. A free Microsoft account and a Microsoft 365 Family subscription take their data out the same way. |
| Documentation clarity | 5/5 | The most precise limits published by any vendor in this section, down to the behaviour when it fails: a downloaded folder containing a notebook yields "an error message in the form of a .txt file". |
| Caps and expiry | 1/5 | The tightest ceilings here. 250GB file size, 10,000 total files, 10,000 files per folder, and for multiple compressed files "10GB per .zip file and 20GB overall". |
What comes out
- Files in their original formats, individually or as a zip.
- Folder structure inside the archive.
- Everything at once through the OneDrive sync client, which avoids the browser zip ceilings.
- Individual files with no stated size limit, unlike bulk downloads.
What stays behind
- OneNote notebooks - stated outright as not downloadable, with a .txt error placed in the zip in their place.
- Anything in the Shared view, which must be opened and saved as a copy one file at a time.
- Files encrypted by sensitivity labels or IRM over 4MB, which are excluded from the zip in some scenarios.
- Anything past 10,000 files, 250GB, or the 20GB overall compressed ceiling.
- Version history, which the download documentation does not cover.
Microsoft publishes the most exact download limits of any vendor in this section. Not approximations, not "large files may take longer" — specific numbers, and a description of what happens when you hit them.
That earns full marks for documentation. It also means the limits are unambiguous, and they are the tightest here.
The notebook problem
Start with the exclusion that has no workaround inside OneDrive.
"You can't download OneNote notebooks. If you download a folder that contains a OneNote notebook, the .zip file will contain an error message in the form of a .txt file."
Read that second sentence again, because it describes the actual failure mode. You select a folder. The download succeeds. You open the zip and everything appears present. Where the notebook should be there is a small text file saying it could not be included.
Most people will not open that text file. They will see a complete-looking archive, cancel the subscription, and find out months later.
For anyone using OneNote seriously — and it is bundled with Microsoft 365, so a great many households and businesses do — this is the single most important line on the page. Export your notebooks from inside OneNote before you touch OneDrive. OneNote has its own export. OneDrive will never give you one.
The zip ceilings are the tightest here
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| File size | 250GB |
| Total files | 10,000 |
| Files per folder | 10,000 |
| Per zip file | 10GB |
| Overall, multiple compressed files | 20GB |
The first three match Dropbox almost exactly. The last two do not exist at Dropbox at all, and they are the binding constraints.
20GB overall is not much. A modest photo library passes it. A few years of video calls recorded to the cloud passes it comfortably. For a Microsoft 365 Family subscriber with up to 6TB of storage, being asked to extract it 20GB at a time through a browser is not a serious proposition.
As with Dropbox, the answer is the sync client: set every folder to always keep on this device and let it write everything to disk. The zip ceilings apply to browser downloads, not to sync.
The trap inside that answer is Files On-Demand. If folders are left as online-only, the client syncs placeholders — you get a directory tree that looks right and contains almost nothing. Check the folder size on disk against your OneDrive usage before you conclude you are finished.
Shared files are a manual job
"You can't download files directly from the Shared view. You will need to open the file and save a copy in the location of your choice."
This one is easy to underestimate. In a working organisation a large share of what you touch daily was created by somebody else and shared with you. None of it is in a bulk download of your own OneDrive, and there is no batch route.
If those documents matter to you personally — a contract, a spec you rely on, a report you co-authored — open each one and save a copy, deliberately, before your access ends. And accept that this is genuinely correct behaviour: those files belong to whoever shared them, not to you.
The encryption edge case
Files protected by sensitivity labels or IRM and larger than 4MB are excluded from the downloaded zip in some scenarios and must be retrieved separately.
Narrow, and it lands precisely on the documents most likely to matter: in a business using sensitivity labels, the labelled files are the confidential ones. The exclusion is silent, like the notebook one, so nothing tells you a labelled contract was skipped.
If your organisation uses labels at all, audit for them before you assume the download is complete.
The verdict
23 out of 30. Excellent documentation, clean formats, and the most restrictive set of limits on this site.
The two points that separate it from Dropbox's 25 are earned honestly: Dropbox has no zip ceiling to speak of and no category of file it outright refuses to hand over. OneNote is a real hole, and a 20GB overall cap on a service selling terabytes is an odd pairing.
None of it is hidden — which is why Microsoft still scores 5 for documentation while scoring 1 for caps. Knowing about a wall does not move it, but it does let you plan a route around it, and here the route is the sync client plus a separate OneNote export.
For the comparison against its closest rival see Dropbox vs OneDrive, and for how the two exits compare directly, the Dropbox exit report.
Before you cancel
- Export OneNote notebooks separately from within OneNote before you do anything else - they will never appear in a download.
- Use the sync client for a full exit rather than browser downloads; the zip ceilings do not apply to it.
- If downloading in the browser, keep each batch under 10GB and remember the 20GB overall compressed limit.
- Go through the Shared view by hand - those files must be opened and saved individually.
- Check for sensitivity-labelled or IRM-protected files over 4MB and retrieve them one at a time.
- Confirm every folder is set to always keep on this device, or the client syncs placeholders instead of files.
- Compare your local file count against the OneDrive total before deleting anything.
What we could not verify
- Whether OneDrive version history can be exported by any documented route.
- Whether the 20GB overall compressed ceiling resets per session or per day.
- What happens to files in a shared library when your account is removed from the organisation.
- Whether Personal Vault contents are included in a standard bulk download.
These are open questions, not criticisms. Where a vendor does not publish an answer we leave it unscored rather than guessing, and the score is calculated only from what is documented.
Questions people ask
How do you download everything from OneDrive?
The sync client is the reliable route - install it, set every folder to always keep on this device, and your files land on disk in their original formats. Browser downloads work but are bounded by a 250GB size limit, a 10,000 file limit, and 10GB per zip with 20GB overall for multiple compressed files.
Why can I not download my OneNote notebooks from OneDrive?
Because Microsoft does not allow it through OneDrive. The documentation states plainly: "You can't download OneNote notebooks. If you download a folder that contains a OneNote notebook, the .zip file will contain an error message in the form of a .txt file." Export them from within OneNote itself instead.
What are the OneDrive download limits?
A 250GB file size limit, a total limit of 10,000 files, a folder limit of 10,000 files, and when downloading multiple compressed files, 10GB per .zip file and 20GB overall. These are the tightest published bulk-download ceilings of any storage service on this site.
Can you download files from the OneDrive Shared view?
Not directly. Microsoft states: "You can't download files directly from the Shared view. You will need to open the file and save a copy in the location of your choice." For anyone whose work arrives mainly as shared files, that turns a bulk export into a manual one.
Is OneDrive export available without Microsoft 365?
Yes. Downloading your own files is not gated behind a subscription - a free Microsoft account can take its data out the same way a Microsoft 365 Family subscriber can. The limits above apply equally to both.
Where this information comes from
Product details change often. Each item below links to the primary source we checked, so you can confirm anything that matters to your decision.
Vendors change their export tooling without announcing it. If something here no longer matches what you see in the product, tell us and we will re-check it.