How to export your data from Microsoft
Requesting the GDPR export, what arrives, and how to open it.
Microsoft is required to give you a copy of the data it holds about you, including activity, search and records. The request itself is free, and arrives as .zip containing JSON and CSV, plus separate downloads. Typical wait: up to 30 days for the archive, minutes for the parts that matter.
Step by step
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Start the archive first, because it is the slow one
Sign in at account.microsoft.com/privacy, choose Download your data, then Create new archive. Tick every category offered rather than accepting the default selection - App and service usage is the one that carries the most, but browsing, search and location are separate ticks and are easy to leave behind.
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Understand what that archive will and will not hold
It holds records of what you did: searches, app and service usage, browsing history, location history, media consumption. It does not hold your OneDrive files and it does not hold your email. If you stop here you will get a picture of your behaviour and none of your things.
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Get OneDrive separately, and do not use the browser for a large one
Sign in at onedrive.com, select the top-level folders and choose Download; the browser zips them for you. For anything large this is slow and fails quietly on a poor connection. The OneDrive desktop app is more reliable: let it sync the folders you want, then copy them off. Files marked online-only need Always keep on this device before they exist locally.
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Export Outlook.com mail from its own settings
In Outlook.com go to Settings, then General, then Privacy and data, and use the export option there. Contacts and calendar export separately from within People and Calendar. None of this appears in the privacy dashboard archive.
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Collect Bing search history from the dashboard itself
Search history is viewable and exportable on the privacy dashboard directly, without waiting for the archive. If searches are what you are after, this is the quick route.
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Come back for the archive when the mail arrives
Microsoft mails you when it is ready and the download sits at account.microsoft.com/privacy/download-data. Check that page rather than relying on the mail - it lists the archives you have requested and their status, which is the more reliable route if the address on the account is one you no longer read.
Opening your Microsoft export
Muletto reads a Microsoft export directly - the zip, without unpacking it first - and finds the activity, search and records inside.
It runs in the browser: the archive is never uploaded, there is no account, and nothing is installed. Open several exports at once and they become one library, with the photographs that appear in more than one of them found automatically.
Worth knowing
Common questions
Why is my OneDrive not in the download?
Because the privacy dashboard exports records about you rather than the files you stored. Your documents and photographs live in OneDrive and come out of OneDrive, at onedrive.com or through the desktop app. The same is true of email, which comes out of Outlook.com's own settings. The archive is a record of activity, and it is easy to read the words Download your data as a promise of more than that.
How long does it really take?
Microsoft says up to 30 days and it is often much less, but there is no progress indicator and no way to hurry it. The practical answer is to request it and then collect OneDrive and Outlook in the meantime, because those are the parts that hold anything you would miss.
What about a work or school account?
A Microsoft 365 account belonging to an employer or a university is administered by them, not by you. The consumer privacy dashboard will show little or nothing for it. Those requests go to whoever runs the tenant, and what you get back is up to their policy.
Can Muletto open it?
Yes. The activity records - searches, browsing, locations, app use - are read from both the CSV and the JSON halves and land on the timeline and the map. No real Microsoft export has been opened here yet, so the reader is written from what the archive is documented to contain rather than from one that turned up. Files pulled out of OneDrive are ordinary files and can be dropped in like any other folder.