guide · meetings
Recording a Microsoft Teams meeting
Starting a recording is one menu entry. Everything surrounding it — who may do it, where the result goes, how long it lasts — accounts for the actual difficulty.
Teams notifies everyone present, and in many jurisdictions recording a conversation without informing participants is unlawful. Announce it yourself as well; the automatic banner is not a substitute for saying so.
Starting it
Open More actions in the meeting controls and look for recording. Depending on your version it may live inside a Record and transcribe submenu next to the transcription controls.
Everyone in the meeting is told, and an indicator remains visible throughout. Latecomers see it on arrival.
Transcription is normally offered at the same moment and is worth switching on. For most meetings a searchable transcript proves more useful than the video, because nobody scrubs through an hour looking for one remark.
Who is permitted
Organisers can. Presenters generally can. Attendees cannot, and neither can guests nor anyone who joined anonymously — those are structural restrictions rather than per-meeting settings.
Above roles sits your organisation's licensing and policy. Recording is something an administrator can disable outright, and in educational institutions and larger companies it frequently is.
An organiser who cannot find the option is nearly always looking at exactly that. No amount of searching the interface will produce it, and resolving it means talking to whoever administers the tenant.
Where it goes
This changed a while ago and outdated instructions still circulate widely. Recordings no longer sit inside Teams — they are written into your organisation's Microsoft 365 storage.
A recording of an ordinary meeting goes into the OneDrive belonging to whoever pressed record, in a folder created for the purpose. A recording of a channel meeting goes to the SharePoint site of that team instead.
A link generally appears in the meeting chat once processing completes, which is the fastest route to it. Where the chat has been cleared, look in the recordings folder of the person who started it.
Retention policies apply and matter. Plenty of organisations delete meeting recordings automatically after a fixed period, sixty days being a common setting. Anything that needs to outlive that should be downloaded rather than left as a link.
The size question
An hour typically produces several hundred megabytes. That is unremarkable while it sits in cloud storage and becomes awkward the instant you need to attach it to a ticket, mail it, or hand it to somebody outside the organisation.
Meetings are among the most compressible video that exists. Faces and shared slides mean the majority of the frame holds still, and stillness is nearly free.
To bring a full recording under an attachment limit, use the video compressor.
Where a single passage is the point, trimming outperforms compressing — start with the video trimmer.
Slide-heavy material tolerates 720p with nothing lost to legibility, via change resolution.
These operate inside the browser rather than on someone's server, which counts for something when the recording is an internal discussion.
When only the words matter
For a meeting destined to be consulted rather than watched, the picture is pure overhead. An hour of speech as an MP3 occupies around thirty megabytes, plays anywhere, and can be handed to a transcription service or simply listened to at double speed.
Separate the sound from the picture with the audio extractor.
Common questions
Can attendees record?
Generally not. Organisers and presenters can; attendees, guests and anonymous participants cannot.
Where do recordings end up?
In the OneDrive of whoever started it for standard meetings, or the team's SharePoint site for channel meetings.
Why can I not see the option?
Most often organisational policy or licensing forbids it, or your role in that meeting is attendee rather than presenter.
How long do they last?
Until your organisation's retention policy removes them. Automatic deletion after a set period is common, so download anything worth keeping.
How do I make one small enough to send?
Trim to the relevant section then compress. If only the discussion matters, extracting the audio takes an hour down to roughly 30 MB.