How to record a Microsoft Teams meeting

Teams announces recordings to everyone present, and in many places recording a conversation without telling participants is unlawful. Say it out loud as well as letting the notification do it.

Starting a recording

In the meeting controls, open the More actions menu and look for the recording option. Depending on your version it may sit under a Record and transcribe submenu alongside the transcription controls.

Everyone in the meeting is notified, and a recording indicator stays visible for the duration. Participants who join later see it too.

Transcription is usually offered alongside recording, and it is worth enabling. A searchable transcript is more useful than the video for most meetings, because nobody rewatches an hour to find one sentence.

Who is allowed to record

The organiser can. Presenters usually can. Attendees generally cannot, and neither can guests or anyone who joined anonymously — those restrictions are built in rather than configurable per meeting.

Beyond roles, the ability depends on your organisation's licence and policy. Recording is a feature an administrator can disable entirely, and in schools and larger companies it frequently is.

If the option is missing and you are the organiser, that is almost always the reason. No amount of clicking will surface it, and the fix is a conversation with whoever administers your tenant.

Where the recording ends up

This changed some years ago and old advice still circulates. Recordings no longer live inside Teams itself — they are saved to your organisation's Microsoft 365 storage.

A recording of a standard meeting goes to the OneDrive of the person who started it, in a folder created for recordings. A recording of a channel meeting goes to the SharePoint site belonging to that team instead.

A link normally appears in the meeting chat once processing finishes, which is the quickest way to find it. If the chat has been cleared, look in the recordings folder of whoever pressed record.

Retention policies apply. Many organisations delete meeting recordings automatically after a set period — sixty days is a common default. If a recording matters beyond that, download a copy rather than trusting the link.

The file size problem

An hour of recorded meeting typically runs to several hundred megabytes. That is fine while it sits in cloud storage and immediately awkward the moment you need to email it, attach it to a ticket, or send it to somebody outside the organisation.

Meetings compress better than almost any other footage. Talking heads and shared slides mean most of the frame is motionless most of the time, and stationary areas cost a compressor almost nothing.

To get a full recording under an attachment limit, use the video compressor.

If only one section matters, trimming beats compressing — start with the video trimmer.

For a slide-heavy recording, dropping to 720p saves a great deal and costs nothing legible with change resolution.

These run inside the browser, which matters here: an internal meeting recording is exactly the kind of file that should not be handed to an unknown server merely to be made smaller.

When you only want the words

For a meeting you intend to reference rather than rewatch, the video is dead weight. An hour of speech as an MP3 is around thirty megabytes and can be fed to a transcription service or simply listened to at double speed.

Pull the soundtrack out and discard the picture with the audio extractor.

Common questions