Where are Microsoft Teams recordings stored?

The short answer

Microsoft Teams does not have a single storage location for recordings. Where a recording is saved is decided automatically by the type of meeting or call, and you cannot pick a different destination through a normal setting. Here is the full branching rule:

• Channel meeting → saved to a Recordingsfolder in the document library of that channel's SharePoint site.
• Non-channel meeting(a scheduled or ad-hoc meeting that is not tied to a Teams channel) → saved to the meeting organizer's OneDrive for Business.
• 1:1 or group call recording → saved to the recorder's OneDrive for Business (the OneDrive of the person who pressed record).

In every case the file lands with an individual user or a specific site, not in a central, organization-wide vault. That distinction is the crux of this whole guide: it is fine for casual use and a genuine problem for compliance. Note also that Teams no longer uses Microsoft Stream (Classic) for recordings — everything now flows into OneDrive or SharePoint.

Channel meetings: stored in SharePoint

When a meeting is held inside a standard Teams channel, its recording is saved to SharePoint — specifically to a folder called Recordings inside the Documents library of the SharePoint team site that backs the team. This makes sense structurally: a channel is already a shared space, so the recording is treated as a shared artifact that belongs to the whole team rather than to whoever clicked record.

The practical consequence is that access follows the site. Anyone who is a member of that channel's SharePoint site can open the recording, because the file inherits the site's existing permissions. There is no separate, per-recording sharing decision. For a team that legitimately shares everything, that is convenient. For a regulated function where recordings may contain sensitive or protected information, inheriting broad site access by default is exactly the kind of governance question that keeps compliance officers up at night.

Microsoft documents this behavior in detail; see the Teams meeting recording storage documentation for the current model.

Other meetings: stored in OneDrive

For every meeting that is not a channel meeting, the recording goes to OneDrive for Business — not a shared location, but the personal OneDrive of a specific individual. Which individual depends on the scenario:

• Scheduled and ad-hoc meetings. The recording is saved to the meeting organizer's OneDrive, in a Recordings folder, regardless of who actually pressed record.
• 1:1 and group calls. The recording is saved to the recorder's OneDrive — the OneDrive of the person who started the recording on that call.

In both cases the file lives inside one employee's personal drive. Teams automatically grants the other in-organization participants access to that file, and the owner can adjust sharing like any other OneDrive document. But the recording is still fundamentally owned by a person, which becomes important the moment that person leaves the company, changes roles, or their account is deactivated. Microsoft's OneDrive sharing documentation describes how that ownership and sharing works.

How to find a recording

Because storage varies by meeting type, there are three reliable ways to locate a recording after the fact:

• From the meeting chat. The fastest route. Open the chat or channel conversation for the meeting and look for the recording, which appears as a linked tile in the message history shortly after the call ends.
• From the Recordings view. In Teams, your recent recordings surface in the calendar and meeting-details views, and in the OneDrive/SharePoint web app a Recordings folder holds the files directly.
• From OneDrive or SharePoint.Go straight to the source. For a non-channel meeting, open the organizer's (or recorder's) OneDrive Recordings folder; for a channel meeting, open the channel's SharePoint site and browse to its Recordings folder.

If you also need to record the meeting in the first place, our step-by-step how to record a Teams meeting guide covers the options.

Why default storage is a problem for compliance

The native model works fine when the goal is convenience. It works poorly when the goal is proving, years later, exactly what was said and being able to produce that evidence on demand. Four specific issues make default storage unsuitable for a regulated environment:

• Recordings are scattered. They are spread across dozens or hundreds of individual OneDrive accounts and various SharePoint sites, with no single place to search, supervise, or export from.
• They are tied to individuals.A recording owned by an employee's OneDrive is at risk when that person departs, is offboarded, or has their license reclaimed — the evidence can be deleted or orphaned along with the account.
• Default retention is a lifecycle setting, not a compliance control. Teams can auto-expire recordings after a default window (commonly 60 days for new recordings), which is the opposite of the multi-year preservation many regulators demand.
• It is hard to govern. Access follows whichever site or person holds the file, so applying consistent access controls, legal holds, and supervision across the whole organization becomes a constant manual effort.

None of this is a flaw in Teams — the native Record button was simply never designed to be a records-retention system. For regulated firms, that is precisely the gap a compliance recording service is built to close.

Compliance recording: stored in a governed archive

Our Microsoft Teams compliance recordingservice takes a different path to storage. Instead of leaving recordings scattered across users' personal OneDrive accounts, the service captures each in-scope call independently and uploads the recording and its transcript automatically to a SharePoint document library inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant — a location you designate and control.

That single change fixes the governance problems above at their root. The evidence lives in one consistent, organization-owned archive rather than in individual mailboxes; it is not tied to any employee's account, so departures do not put it at risk; and access, retention, and supervision are applied centrally under your controls. See SharePoint storage for how the destination is configured, and the compliance recording service overview for how capture and upload work end to end.

Retention and access

Storage location and retention are two sides of the same governance question: it is not enough to know where a recording lives — you also need to control how long it is kept and who can reach it. Native storage leaves both to defaults: the auto-expiration window on OneDrive/SharePoint and the site-or-owner permissions the file inherits.

Regulated organizations replace those defaults with explicit rules. Retention is set to the period the applicable regulation requires — which can range from a few years to seven or more depending on the framework — and access is restricted to the specific supervisors and compliance staff who need it. For the full breakdown of which rules require what, read our Teams recording retention requirements guide. Microsoft's own recording storage and retention documentation covers the native defaults you would otherwise be relying on.

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