Where Your Meeting Recordings Live, and Who Can Open Them
If you record meetings with an AI notetaker, you almost certainly have two copies of every conversation and not one. The video platform keeps its own recording and transcript in your organization's storage, and the notetaker keeps a separate transcript and summary on the vendor's systems. They sit in different places, follow different retention rules, and answer to different administrators. Most people asking where their recordings live are picturing a single file. Understanding that there are two layers is what makes the rest of the answer make sense.
You probably have two copies of every meeting
The two layers get created by different actions and neither one knows about the other.
The platform layer is what Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams saves when a recording is started on the call itself. It lands in your organization's own storage, under your organization's own administrators.
The notetaker layer is what your AI tool captures and processes, whether it joined as a bot or listened to your computer's system audio. It lands on the vendor's infrastructure, under the vendor's policies and your account settings.
Turning one off does not turn off the other. Deleting one does not delete the other. This is the single most common misunderstanding in this area, and it is why people who have carefully cleaned up their Zoom cloud recordings are surprised to find a full searchable archive still sitting in a notetaker account.
Layer one: what the video platform keeps
Microsoft's own administrator documentation for Teams is unusually specific here, and it is a useful concrete example even if you use a different platform, because the shape of the answer is similar everywhere (checked 2026-08-04).
For meetings and events, Teams recordings save to the organizer's OneDrive, in a Recordings folder, even if the organizer did not attend. For one-to-one and group calls, the recording goes to the OneDrive of whoever pressed record. For channel meetings, it goes to the channel's SharePoint document library instead.
That first detail matters more than it looks. In a meeting you did not organize, the recording lands in someone else's storage, and your access to it is granted rather than owned. If you are relying on being able to go back to a recording of a call somebody else scheduled, that is a dependency worth knowing about.
Microsoft's documentation also notes that a one-hour recording is around 400 MB, and that recordings count against your OneDrive and SharePoint quota. Meeting archives get large faster than people expect.
Layer two: what the notetaker keeps
The notetaker's copy is usually a transcript and a summary rather than video, and what it retains varies more than people assume.
Some tools deliberately keep less. Granola states in its own materials that it captures audio from your device, transcribes it in real time, and then deletes it, with no recording stored (checked 2026-08-04). Fireflies' documentation similarly states that recording without its bot does not save audio or video files, and produces a transcript and summary instead. In both of those cases there is no media file to find later, which is a privacy benefit and an operational limitation at the same time, as covered in our guide to bot in the call versus bot-free capture.
Others keep the media indefinitely by default until something deletes it. The only reliable way to know which kind you have is to read your specific tool's current documentation. Vendors in this category publish competing comparisons of each other's storage practices, and those are marketing, not sources. Check what a vendor says about itself, and check the date.
Who can open it, which is rarely who you assumed
Default access is where most of the genuine surprises live, and Teams again gives a concrete picture.
Per Microsoft's documentation, for a scheduled meeting the organizer has full permissions, co-organizers can edit and share, and everyone else from the organizer's own organization gets read access. External participants get no access at all unless the organizer explicitly shares it with them. In a one-to-one call with an external party, the person who recorded owns it and the other side has nothing.
Two implications worth sitting with. First, in an internal meeting, "who can open this" is often broader than the people who were actually in the room, because access follows the organization rather than the attendee list. Second, the client on your call cannot see the recording of their own conversation unless you send it, which is fine, but it means they are relying entirely on your judgment about it.
On the notetaker layer, the equivalent question is whether your workspace is shared. Many notetakers default to making notes visible across a team workspace, and some have historically defaulted share links to be broadly accessible. If your account is part of a company workspace, assume colleagues can see more than you would guess until you have checked the setting yourself.
How long it stays, and who decides
Retention is set by whoever administers each layer, not by you, unless you are the administrator.
On the platform layer, Microsoft documents retention through labels and policies, applied by administrators through Microsoft Purview, with a documented minimum retention period of one day. There is also an edge case worth knowing: if a Teams recording cannot upload because nobody involved has OneDrive storage available, it goes to temporary storage and is deleted after 21 days if nobody downloads it.
On the notetaker layer, retention depends on the vendor and your plan. Granola, for example, describes organization-wide auto-deletion schedules so transcripts are removed on a defined timetable. Whether your tool offers that, and whether anyone has configured it, is a question with a real answer that most teams have never looked up.
The default in the absence of a policy is usually "forever." Meeting archives are rarely deleted by accident.
The audit worth doing once
This takes about twenty minutes and most people have never done it.
- Find the platform copy. Record a test meeting, then locate the file. Note which account owns it and which folder it landed in.
- Find the notetaker copy. Open your tool and confirm whether it holds a media file, a transcript, or both.
- Check the sharing scope on both. Specifically, is your notetaker workspace shared with colleagues, and are any share links broader than you intended?
- Look for a retention setting on each. If you find none, the answer is that nothing is being deleted.
- Search your own archive for something sensitive. Search for a term like "salary" or a client name across your notetaker history. Whatever comes back is what exists, and it is usually more than remembered.
That last step is the one that changes behavior, because it turns an abstract policy question into a concrete list of conversations.
What to change if the answer bothered you
If the audit produced an uncomfortable result, three changes do most of the work.
Set a retention period on both layers rather than keeping everything by default. Stop recording the categories of meeting that do not need a record, particularly one-to-ones, which is covered in our guide to telling people you are recording. And if stored media is the specific concern, a capture mode that keeps only a transcript removes the entire category of risk, which is one of the honest advantages discussed in the bot versus bot-free comparison and visible in tools like Granola that document deleting audio after transcription.
A separate and broader question sits behind all of this: what every tool your company uses does with company data as a matter of policy. That is a wider governance topic than one notetaker, and it is not covered on this page. The narrower and more answerable version, whether your meeting transcripts are used to train a model, is covered in does your meeting data train the model.
Storage locations, permission defaults, and retention behavior change with platform updates. Confirm the current details in your own platform's and vendor's documentation before relying on any specific one here. If you are still choosing a tool, start with the hub guide on how to choose an AI meeting note taker.
FAQ
Where do AI meeting recordings get stored?
In two places. The video platform's own recording goes to your organization's storage, and per Microsoft's Teams documentation that is the organizer's OneDrive for meetings or the channel's SharePoint library for channel meetings. The notetaker keeps its own separate transcript and summary on the vendor's systems.
Can other people at my company see my meeting recordings?
Often yes. Per Microsoft's documentation, for a scheduled Teams meeting everyone from the organizer's organization gets read access by default. On the notetaker side, shared team workspaces frequently make notes visible to colleagues.
Can the client on my call see the recording?
Not by default in Teams. External participants have no access unless the organizer explicitly shares it with them.
How long are meeting recordings kept?
Until something deletes them. Retention is set by administrators through policies on the platform side and by vendor and plan settings on the notetaker side. If nobody has configured a retention period, assume the answer is indefinitely.
Does deleting the Zoom or Teams recording delete the notetaker's copy?
No. The two layers are independent. Deleting one leaves the other untouched, which is why archives survive cleanups people believed were thorough.