What it does

Teams meeting recordings and transcripts are ordinary files in OneDrive or SharePoint — the organiser's OneDrive for normal meetings, the channel's SharePoint library for channel meetings. Permissions, quota, retention and an automatic expiration date all follow from where that file lands.

Key facts

• Scheduled, Meet now, recurring and Outlook-scheduled meetings (and Teams events) save to the Recordings folder in the organiser's OneDrive, whoever pressed Record. 1:1 and group calls save to the OneDrive of the person who pressed Record.
• Channel meetings save to the team's SharePoint site, under the channel's folder, in a Recordings folder; access follows the channel's SharePoint permissions.
• If the organiser has no OneDrive, Teams falls back to co-organiser 1, 2 and 3 (in Meeting options order), then the recording initiator, and finally to temporary async media storage. Files there aren't retried — the organiser has to download them, and they're deleted after 21 days.
• Internal invitees get a personally shared link automatically; external participants have to be shared explicitly by the owner. In meetings over 250 participants some people won't get permissions automatically.
• Co-organisers get the same edit permissions as the organiser on recordings in the organiser's OneDrive.
• Expiration is set in the meeting policy (Recording & transcription) with Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -NewMeetingRecordingExpirationDays. Default 120 days, range 1–99,999, and -1 (PowerShell only) for never expire. A1 users are capped at 30 days.
• Expired recordings and transcripts go to the recycle bin — 93 days for work or school OneDrive by default, site recycle bin rules for SharePoint. Changing the policy only affects new recordings.
• Event recordings (webinars, town halls) expire after 30 days by default, extendable to 90.
• A one-hour recording is roughly 400 MB and counts against OneDrive/SharePoint quota. The maximum recording length is 4 hours or 1.5 GB, after which the recording restarts.
• Transcription is -AllowTranscription on the meeting policy (on by default); live captions are -LiveCaptionsEnabledType (DisabledUserOverride by default). If recording is on but transcription is off, no transcript is saved and captions can't be shown on playback.
• Live translated captions and live translated transcription need the organiser to hold Teams Premium.

When to use / skip

You don't really choose this — it's how recording works. What you choose is the policy around it: who can record, whether transcripts are created, how long files live and who can download them. Get those decisions written down at the start of the project, because Copilot, intelligent recap and compliance teams all care about whether transcripts exist.

Skip the instinct to set expiration to "never". Recordings are big, nobody watches them after a fortnight, and they sit in the leaver's OneDrive until retention catches them. The 120-day default is sensible for most organisations. Where there's a legal hold or records requirement, that's a Purview retention job, not an expiration job — the two work independently, and retention wins.

Configuration decisions

• Whether recording and transcription are on for everyone, or restricted by policy for some groups (HR, legal, works-council-sensitive regions).
• Default expiration days, and whether any group needs a longer or shorter value.
• Whether to require participant agreement for recording and transcription (Off by default).
• Whether to block download of recording files for non-owners, and the channel equivalent (ChannelRecordingDownload).
• How to handle Teams Rooms resource accounts — don't give them OneDrive, or recordings started from the room land somewhere participants can't reach.
• Whether shared mailboxes that organise meetings need a Teams licence and OneDrive so their recordings have a home.
• Retention labels for transcripts and recordings where compliance needs them.

Gotchas

• Recording a meeting someone else organised puts the file in their OneDrive, not yours. People go looking in their own Recordings folder and log a ticket.
• Forwarded invites don't grant access — only people in the meeting chat thread get the link. Externals always need an explicit share.
• A Teams Room account with a OneDrive licence becomes the storage location, and participants don't get full permissions by default. Microsoft's own advice is not to give the room account OneDrive.
• Moving or copying a recording breaks closed captions on playback. Leave them where Teams put them.
• Expiration on a recording can't be retrofitted by changing the policy — only new recordings pick up the new value. Owners can still change individual expiry dates.
• Turning Copilot off for a meeting also turns off recording and transcription. Clients configuring "Copilot off" templates often don't expect that.

Consultant notes

• Agree with the client's records team how expiration and Purview retention interact before go-live; they'll otherwise assume expiration is a deletion control.
• Check OneDrive provisioning for every licensed organiser during migrations. Unprovisioned OneDrive pushes recordings into the 21-day async store and they quietly vanish.
• For channel meetings, explain that recording access tracks channel membership — private and shared channels have their own SharePoint sites.
• Large all-hands are better as town halls than 1,000-person meetings partly because of recording permissions; over 250 participants, permissions get patchy.
• If the client needs consent prompts, test "Require participant agreement" with external and dial-in participants before announcing it.

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Worth revisiting if Microsoft changes the event recording defaults or moves recordings away from OneDrive to SharePoint Embedded containers