Half a Canvas course is not made of files. There is one built-in route to the other half, it has a hard deadline, and almost nobody knows about either.
Short answer
None of it is a file, so no file-based download reaches it. The one built-in route is Canvas's offline content feature: an Export Course Content button on the Modules page that packages the course as browsable HTML. Students can use it, but it is an administrator setting that is absent at many institutions - and Instructure states that offline content cannot be downloaded once a course is concluded, so it closes at exactly the moment people go looking. Backing up a course before you lose access is the procedure that follows from that.
It also leaves out the two things most worth having: "Discussions and
quizzes only include the description", and discussion replies must be
viewed online. The complete .imscc course export needs a
teacher role. Failing both, the fallback is printing each page to PDF -
and quizzes first, because their results can be set to show
only once.
On this page
Half of a Canvas course is not made of files. The quiz you revised from, the thread where the answer finally appeared, the Page with the reading list on it, the announcement that changed the exam format: none of that is in the Files tab. So none of it comes down when you zip that tab, and most guides to downloading Canvas never mention it.
There is one built-in route to it. It has a hard deadline, and almost nobody knows about either.
A PDF your lecturer uploaded is a file. A Page they wrote is a set of rows in Canvas's database, rendered into a web page when you open it. Same for an announcement, a discussion thread, a quiz and an assignment brief. There is no document sitting on a disk anywhere for Canvas to hand you.
That is why Download as Zip and every other file-based route come back without it, and it is why the honest answer in Instructure's own community thread on downloading a whole course is "As for Pages and Assignments, I'm not sure of a quick way off the top of my head".
Canvas has a feature called offline content, and students can use it. From the Modules page there may be an Export Course Content button that produces a zip of the whole course as browsable HTML - Pages, announcements, assignment details, embedded media, the lot, linked together and readable with no login.
Most people have never seen it, for two reasons. It is an administrator setting that has to be switched on, so it is simply absent at many institutions. And it lives on the Modules page, which is not where anybody looks for a download.
It stops working the moment the course ends. Instructure states it plainly: "Offline content cannot be downloaded once a course is concluded." So the only built-in route to this material closes at exactly the point people go looking for it. A course concludes on its own schedule, often while you still have an account and can still read everything on screen. That is one of the three separate endings covered in what happens to your Canvas access after graduation. Use it during term, or not at all.
It is also a snapshot rather than a subscription: "you will need to download the course each time you want to view updated course content". One export in week 12 is not the same course as one in week 4.
Worth knowing before you rely on it, and Instructure documents all of it in the same article:
Read Instructure's own user guidelines while you are there. The same article states: "When exporting course content, you may not reproduce or communicate any of the content in the course, including exported files, without your institution's prior written permission." That is about redistribution rather than about keeping a personal study copy, and it is the same line every route on this page sits behind.
Canvas has a second, much more complete export: a course export package,
an .imscc file. Instructure's guide to
exporting a Canvas course
lists what goes in it, and the list is the whole course: settings,
syllabus, modules, assignments, quizzes, question banks,
discussions, pages, announcements, rubrics, files, calendar events.
It requires a teacher role. That single fact explains most of the confusion around this subject: the good export exists, it is thoroughly documented, and every guide you find describing it was written for somebody with a different set of buttons than you have.
It is not a waste of time to ask, though. A lecturer can run one in about a minute, and for a course you are about to lose it is a reasonable request - especially alongside asking for the recordings, which is the other thing worth asking about at the same time.
With no offline export, this is the fallback, and the mechanism is the
same everywhere: print the page to PDF
(Ctrl+P or Cmd+P, then
Save as PDF). It is crude, it works everywhere, and it captures what you
can see.
Budget realistically. A course with 30 Pages, 20 announcements and a dozen discussions is an afternoon, and you have several courses.
Everything else on this page stays visible for as long as you can open the course. Quiz questions and your answers may not, and the reason is a setting your lecturer chose before you ever took it.
Canvas offers Let Students See Their Quiz Responses with an option called Only Once After Each Attempt. Rice University's Canvas guidance describes what that does: "Students will only be able to view the results immediately after they have completed the quiz". Once. Ever.
The option can also be switched off entirely, and results can carry show and hide dates so they disappear on a schedule. So the practical rule is blunt: if a quiz's questions and your answers are on screen in front of you, that may be the only time they ever will be. Print it to PDF before you close the tab.
This matters more than it sounds for revision. A past quiz is the closest thing most courses give you to a specimen exam paper, and the version with your own wrong answers marked on it is worth considerably more than a clean copy.
Not all of it, and deciding is most of the work. In rough order:
Canvas Downloader reads the Canvas API directly rather than the Files tab, so it can fetch the things that are not files and write them out as readable documents beside the slides: assignments, announcements, discussions with their replies, quizzes with their questions, the syllabus, rubrics, and the feedback on your own submissions. It does that for every course you select in one run, and it can put each kind in its own folder or leave everything inline.
Two limits worth stating. It fetches Classic Quizzes; New Quizzes is a separate Instructure product delivered as an external tool, and it is not covered. It can also only ever save what your account is allowed to see. If a quiz's results are hidden from you by the setting above, they are hidden from any tool acting as you, which is exactly as it should be.
Tick as many courses as you like. Canvas Downloader saves the quizzes with their questions and the discussion threads with the replies, along with the announcements, the Pages, the assignment briefs and the syllabus. All of it as ordinary documents on your own disk, beside every file from the same courses.
No Modules page, no administrator setting, and no deadline when the course concludes. Free and open source, Windows and macOS.
Not through the Files tab, because none of them are files - they are database records Canvas renders into web pages. If your institution has enabled offline content there is an Export Course Content button on the Modules page that produces the course as browsable HTML. Otherwise the built-in answer is printing each page to PDF one at a time.
Canvas's offline content feature. It packages the course as HTML you can read with no login, and students can use it. The catch is that it is an administrator setting, so it is simply absent at many institutions. Instructure also states that offline content cannot be downloaded once a course is concluded.
No. Instructure's own documentation says "Discussions and quizzes only include the description", and that all discussion replies, graded or ungraded, count as submissions and must be viewed online. So you get the quiz blurb and the discussion prompt, and not the questions or the thread.
The complete export - the .imscc course export package containing settings, syllabus, modules, assignments, quizzes, question banks, discussions, pages, announcements, rubrics and files - requires a teacher role. It exists and is well documented, which is why so many guides describe a button students do not have. Asking a lecturer to run one takes them about a minute.
Often not, and sometimes not even before it ends. Canvas has an option called Only Once After Each Attempt, under which students can view the results immediately after finishing and never again, and quiz results can also be switched off entirely or given hide dates. If a quiz and your answers are on screen, treat that as the only time and save it then.
Expand the whole thread first, including any "show more replies" links, then print the page to PDF. The offline HTML export will not do it - replies count as submissions and are online-only - so it is either printing or a tool that reads the discussions API.
Keeping a personal study copy of material you have legitimate access to is widely accepted; redistributing it is not. Instructure's own guidance on the offline export says you may not reproduce or communicate course content, including exported files, without your institution's prior written permission. Read that as a rule about sharing rather than about saving, and check your own institution's policy.
The offline HTML export gives only the description for any quiz, new or classic. Canvas Downloader fetches Classic Quizzes with their questions; New Quizzes is a separate Instructure product delivered as an external tool and is not covered, so for those the reliable route is still printing the results page while you can see it.