Read time 4 minutes
Microsoft’s OneDrive is one of the best platforms to store your files and other documents. Office 365 users can upload files and documents and can access them or download them when required; it even allows you to share these files with other Office 365 users.
But, when it comes to downloading files from OneDrive, many users often struggle with downloading their OneDrive data. People who are using the desktop version of OneDrive can easily download files to their computer. However, many users are not familiar with the web version of OneDrive & SharePoint (SharePoint Online). To help with the file-saving process, refer to an easy step-by-step method in the blog.
Reasons to save Office 365 data to local environment
Before jumping to the steps to download your Office 365 documents & files, let’s understand the fundamental reasons why a user may want to do so.
- The local copy of the online data can serve as a backup.
- Users may want to free cloud space to accommodate new documents.
- Users may want to download and share Office 365 data with someone.
Now, let’s begin the process of accessing & saving your valuable Office 365 files to a local system
Steps to download Office 365 data to computer
Downloading files from Office 365 is very quick and straightforward. The comprehensive step-by-step guide to save data locally is given below. Follow the steps in the same order to avoid any failure.
- Go to OneDrive or SharePoint Online Website and sign-in with your account. Now, select the files or folders that you want to download. For instance:
- If you wish to download individual or multiple files, then select each item by checking the circle checkbox that appears as shown below:
- If you want to select all files available in a folder at once, then check the checkbox on the left of the header row and press Ctrl + A.
- If you want to select a whole folder, then you need to go up or back a level to select the entire folder.
- If you wish to download individual or multiple files, then select each item by checking the circle checkbox that appears as shown below:
- Now, after selecting the specific files or folders, click Download in the top navigation.
- After clicking the Download button, the browser will provide options like Save or Save As. Click any option and select the location where you want to Save the file on your system.
Note: This button only appears when you have selected files or folders to download. Also, if you refresh the web page, the Download button might disappear.
Note: If you’ve selected multiple files or folders, then the browser will start downloading a zip file containing all the selected files and folders.
Limitations of manual method
Though this is an easy method to download files and folders from OneDrive, it has some limitations, such as:
- Files cannot be downloaded from the shared view.
- One Note notebook cannot be downloaded. If you try to download a folder that contains a OneNote notebook, the zip file will contain an error.
- In on-premises SharePoint Server, the option to download multiple files is not available until you buy an Office 365 business plan.
- You cannot use Internet Explorer to download folders and files from OneDrive for Business (Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome can be used).
- The maximum downloading file size limit is 15 GB for individual files and 20 GB for the zip file.
Migrate Office 365 data for an additional security
In case you are saving data from cloud for the purpose of backup or storage space requirements. There is another option you can explore- migrating Office data. You can transfer your crucial SharePoint or OneDrive data to another tenant and increase the data availability. However, data migration is a challenging task & requires a skilled admin.
To quickly and effortlessly migrate data, we recommend relying on a secure third-party tool, like Kernel Migration for SharePoint. This sophisticated SharePoint migration tool is empowered with highly optimized algorithms to deeply scan and map data precisely from source to destination.
This tool not only helps you to download data from Office 365, but it also allows for SharePoint tenant to tenant migration.
The robust tool transfers data with complete integrity and can migrate SharePoint permissions along with other Office 365 items. All the user-defined permissions & configurations will be intact, saving the admin a lot of work post-migration.
Note: We recommend creating a SharePoint backup if you want to migrate SharePoint sites.
Conclusion
Downloading Office 365 data to your local machine can help in different scenarios, as discussed above. Utilize the free procedure mentioned in the blog to safely get all your data offline. However, to eliminate the limitations of manual method, we recommend you employ Kernel Migration for SharePoint. This sophisticated tool is very useful if you wish to backup or migrate your precious Office data.
After many failed attempts with manual methods, I was still not able to download a large file. I almost gave up. Finally, after a colleague’s recommendation I gave a shot at trying the Migrator software, and my God, it worked like magic. No commands from my side, the tool did everything for me. Absolutely brilliant!