Five settings decide what you are allowed to save, and you can only check them while you are still enrolled. Here they are, with what to download in the order the doors actually close.
Short answer
Check five things today, in about five minutes: whether Account then Settings offers a + New Access Token button, whether a course's Modules page has Export Course Content, whether Files is in the course navigation, whether a lecture recording offers a download, and whether its captions are available even when the video is not. Every one of those is a setting somebody else chose, and none of them can be checked once you are locked out.
Then download in the order the doors close, which is the reverse of the obvious one: lecture recordings first, because they usually expire first and nobody else has a copy, and the Files tab last, because it is the best-protected category on the list. Canvas's own offline export stops working once a course is concluded, so the checking has to happen while the course is still open.
On this page
Most advice about saving your Canvas work tells you what to download. The harder problem is that five settings at your institution decide what you are allowed to download, none of them is announced, and you can only check them while you are still enrolled.
So this page is a list rather than an essay. Work through part one today, in about five minutes. Parts two and three are for the last fortnight of term. It prints, if you would rather have it on paper.
Today · about 5 minutes · while the courses are open
Last two weeks of term · hardest thing first
Same evening · 10 minutes · while a gap is still fixable
The one deadline that surprises people: Canvas's own offline export is the only built-in route to Pages, quizzes and discussions, and Instructure's documentation states that "offline content cannot be downloaded once a course is concluded". The backup tool expires before the thing it backs up.
The order above is deliberately the reverse of the obvious one. Files are the obvious button, so most people start there and run out of term before they reach the recordings. That is backwards for three reasons.
Access does not end once. It ends in stages, and the stages belong to different systems that do not consult each other. Lecture recordings usually go first, because Panopto is a separate product with its own retention rules and its own idea of when your course is over. The course concluding is a second, later event. Your enrolment ending is a third, later still. The full account of that staircase, with the published retention policies behind it, is in how to back up a Canvas course before you lose access.
Recordings are also the slowest thing to fetch and the only thing nobody else has a copy of. A lecture is an hour of video. Your notes exist elsewhere, the reading list is on a syllabus you can re-request, and a lecturer will usually re-send a slide deck. Nobody re-records a lecture for you.
And files are the best-protected category anyway. They are the one thing Canvas has a bulk button for, they are usually mirrored in your own downloads folder already, and they are what a friend on the same course can send you. Everything above them on the list has none of those fallbacks.
Each of these is a setting somebody else chose, usually before you enrolled. None is announced anywhere. All five take seconds to check and cannot be checked once you are locked out.
Account, then Settings, then scroll to Approved Integrations and look for + New Access Token. Instructure documents the button in every user's own account settings, and administrators have been able to switch it off for students since September 2025.
If it is missing, no tool that talks to the Canvas API can work for you, including this one. That is not a small thing to discover in your last week. Browser extensions need no token because they ride the session you are already signed in to, so they still work. More on what the token is and what it cannot reach is in what a Canvas access token is.
Open a course, click Modules, and look top right. This is Canvas's offline content feature, it produces the whole course as browsable HTML, and Instructure documents it for students specifically. Almost nobody knows it exists, for two good reasons: it is an administrator setting that is simply absent at many institutions, and it lives on the Modules page, which is not where anyone looks for a download.
Check it per course, not once. It is enabled per course on top of the institution-level setting, so having it in one course tells you nothing about another. And it is the switch with a deadline attached: once the course concludes, the button stops working.
Look at the left-hand menu inside a course. Instructors choose which links appear there, and hiding Files is common, usually so that students go through the modules in order rather than browsing ahead.
This one is measured. Across 33 real courses censused for this site, 11 held any material, and in 3 of those 11 the Files listing was refused outright. Those three courses held 246 files between them, every one of them still reachable through the modules one at a time. So the failure people warn about, a zip that misses a few module-attached files, turned out to be the rare one. The common failure is that there is no zip button at all.
Open one and look for a download control. In both Canvas Studio and Panopto downloading is off by default and somebody has to switch it on, in Panopto's case per folder or per recording. Stanford's guidance to its own staff on enabling download of Panopto recordings for students is a fair example of what the lecturer sees.
If it is off, ask. It is one checkbox for the person who owns the folder, and asking in week ten of term is a very different conversation from asking in the week after grades. Which system you are actually looking at changes the answer completely, and there are six of them: how to download lecture videos from Canvas tells them apart.
This is the one worth knowing and almost nobody does. The transcript is a separate permission from the video, and lecturers who restrict the recording routinely leave captions open, because switching accessibility features off is not a decision anyone wants to defend. Brown University's IT knowledge base dates automatic captions becoming the default for new content to "on or before May 11, 2026", driven by accessibility law rather than a product roadmap. Tenants are configured independently, so check yours, but the direction is one way.
For revision a transcript is often the better artefact anyway: it is searchable, it is a thousandth of the size, and it is what an AI study tool can actually read. How to get a transcript of a Panopto lecture covers the free routes first.
Part 3 exists because every one of those checks has caught a real failure, and all of them are silent. A download that fails halfway usually reports success, and the folder looks right.
The recording check is the one to do properly. Skip to the last minute rather than the first. A truncated video has a plausible file size, a working thumbnail and a seek bar of the right length, and it simply stops. If you check the opening thirty seconds you will find nothing wrong with a file that is missing its final third.
The discussion check catches a whole category. Instructure's own documentation of the offline export says that "discussions and quizzes only include the description", and that replies are treated as submissions that must be viewed online. So an export can look complete and contain none of the actual conversation.
Do all of it while you still have access. That is what turns a gap into something you can fix in ten minutes rather than something you discover in March.
Part 1 today, whenever today is. It costs five minutes and it is the part that decides whether the rest is possible at all.
Part 2 in the last two weeks of teaching, not the last two weeks of term. Assessment periods are when you have least time and most to lose, and lecture recordings from a module that finished early can disappear before the module you are still sitting exams for.
The one date to actually diarise is the day after your last class of the first module that ends, because concluding is per course. Waiting for the semester to be over means waiting past several separate deadlines that already went.
Print it. This page is set up to print as the checklist alone, without the navigation, the explanations or the footer, with the source links written out so they can still be checked on paper. Ctrl+P, or Cmd+P on a Mac.
Canvas Downloader does the downloading half. Tick the courses and it brings down the Panopto lecture recordings, as video, as audio or as a searchable transcript made on your own machine, along with the quizzes and their questions, the feedback you were given with its rubrics and comments, the Pages, the announcements, the discussions and the files. It converts as it goes, so what lands in the folder still opens in five years without Canvas.
It also remembers. Run it again next term and it fetches only what changed, and it never overwrites a file you have annotated.
Check the five settings today, whenever today is, because they decide what is possible and take about five minutes. Do the downloading in the last two weeks of teaching rather than the last two weeks of term. The date that matters is the end of the first course to conclude, not the end of the semester, because courses conclude one at a time.
Lecture recordings, then quizzes and your answers, then assignment feedback, then Pages and discussions, and the Files tab last. That is the reverse of the order most people use. Files are the best-protected category, since Canvas has a bulk button for them and other people on your course have copies. Recordings have the shortest deadline, take the longest to fetch, and nobody else has them.
It is an administrator setting that is absent at many institutions, it is also enabled per course on top of that, and it lives on the Modules page rather than anywhere labelled download. Check for it in each course separately. If it is not there, ask a lecturer to run a course export for you, which takes them about a minute.
Yes, but not in bulk through Canvas. Hiding Files in course navigation is a normal instructor choice and it removes the Download as Zip route entirely. The files themselves are still reachable through the modules one at a time, and through the Canvas API. In 33 courses measured for this site, 3 of the 11 that held material refused the Files listing, and those three held 246 files.
Not the video, no, and that is a permission rather than a technical obstacle. Ask them, because it is one checkbox and asking during term is a different conversation from asking afterwards. Check the captions separately though: the transcript is a different permission and is often left available when the download is not.
Partly. A concluded course usually stays readable in Past Enrolments, so files and pages you can still open you can still save. What closes is Canvas offline export, which Instructure states cannot be run once a course is concluded, and often the lecture recordings, which follow their own retention policy. Check what you can still open before assuming either way.
No. Every item on the list has a route through Canvas itself, and this page gives them. Software is worth it when the manual version does not scale, which is at about the point where you are doing seven courses by hand or want the categories Canvas has no bulk export for at all.
Open three files at random, one big, one small, one old. Play a recording from its last minute rather than its first, because a truncated video looks healthy until you reach the end. Click into a discussion in the offline export and look for the replies, which are usually left online only. Then sort the folder by size and look at the bottom for zero-byte files.