Where Teams Meeting Recordings Actually Go and How to Find Them

This is one of the most common questions I get from people who've just had a meeting recorded and then can't find it five minutes later. The short answer is OneDrive or SharePoint, but which one depends on where the meeting happened.

Channel meetings vs regular meetings

If the meeting happened inside a Teams channel, the recording gets saved to that team's SharePoint site, in a folder structure under Recordings. If it was a regular meeting, invited through someone's calendar rather than posted in a channel, the recording goes to the organizer's OneDrive, again inside a Recordings folder.

This trips people up because they go looking in the chat first, which makes sense since that's usually where the recording used to live years ago. These days the chat just has a link pointing to wherever the file actually lives.

The fastest way to find one

Honestly, the quickest path is usually not to browse folders at all. Open the meeting in your calendar, or find the chat thread for that meeting, and look for the recording link near the top or in the chat history. Teams also keeps a running list if you go to the Teams app itself, click the three dots on the left navigation, and open Recordings and Transcripts, which shows everything you've had access to recently in one place, sorted by date.

If you know roughly when the meeting happened but can't find the chat, search directly in OneDrive or SharePoint search using part of the meeting title. Recordings are named after the meeting, so a search for the meeting subject usually surfaces it in seconds.

A word on how long they stick around

By default, recordings expire after a set number of days, often somewhere around 60 or 120 depending on how your organization has configured retention. After that, they can get automatically deleted unless someone moved them or an admin changed the policy. If a recording matters and you'll need it months from now, don't rely on it staying in the default location. Download it or move it somewhere with a longer retention policy.

I've been caught out by this once, looking for a recording from a client call that I assumed would still be there three months later. It wasn't, and there was no getting it back. Now I move anything important the same week it's recorded, and I'd suggest doing the same rather than trusting the default settings to hold onto something you'll want later.