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Microsoft Teams is a powerful business-focused collaboration platform, but one question often asked: Do Microsoft Teams recordings expire?

Microsoft team’s recordings expire, but they do so 21 days after the meeting. After the Microsoft teams meetings, the recordings will be available in the meeting chat for this period. After expiring, they will not be available for download.

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Do Microsoft Teams Recordings Expire?

If you are a Microsoft team user, you can record the team meetings, screen sharing activity, and group calls for capturing audio and video. Moreover, you have the option to transcribe the recordings automatically. With this feature, the users can playback recordings and look for important items in the discussion from the transcript.

All Microsoft recording takes place in the cloud, and usually, the users save them in the Microsoft stream if they want to share it with other people and for future reference. Microsoft Teams also provide its users with the option for downloading the meetings once the recording is over. The downloading option is also in the Microsoft stream.

However, while you can download the recording, they can expire after some time. The expiration of Microsoft Teams recording affects users with both the A1 and the A1 plus licenses. Once users finish recording the meeting, they will see the option for downloading it and the time remaining until the meeting expires.

Before uploading or downloading meetings to or from the Microsoft Stream, you require the Microsoft Stream License. However, if you want only to record and download the meeting, you need not have the license. As such, your teams’ recording will not be stored in the Microsoft Stream.

When you do not have the license, the recordings of your meetings go to the Teams Azure Media Services (AMS). But they will only be here for 21 days before, after which the application will delete them. The deleting of the meetings is not something that the admin has control of or can manage, which also includes the ability to delete it.

If your recordings are in the AMS, only the chat message itself can manage the recording retention. For this reason, once the deletion of the recording means that the users will not be able to access the recording at all. Therefore, if you have saved your recording for a later date, ensure that you get access to it and download it before it expires.

How Long Do Microsoft Teams Recordings Last?

After recording and uploading the Microsoft Teams meetings, they will be available in the meeting chat for 21 days. After these days elapse, you cannot download the recordings. Therefore, you can access the meeting during this period and recover everything you lost from it.

Usually, the person who starts the meeting is the only one able to record it and make it available to other meeting participants. And once the recording is over, the meeting recording will be available in the Microsoft stream for some time. But the owner of the meeting has the option of deleting it.

If one fails to upload the Microsoft Stream meeting, it will go to the Team’s Cloud Storage. Here the meeting recording will only be available for 21 days after it expires and gets deleted.

So, the Microsoft Teams recordings that will be available will be dependent on the chat retention policy and what the user manual decides. Once the original message is gone, users may not be able to access the recording. Also, they will not download it, but Microsoft’s internal systems may still retain the recording not exceeding the original 21 days.

The chat retention policy affects the AMS. Though the recordings on the AMS will be available for 21 days before the deletion occurs, if the chat message gets deleted before the 21 days elapsing, the recording will also be deleted by Teams. For this reason, there is no way you can recover your recordings.

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How long does Microsoft Teams Meetings Last?

Microsoft Teams meetings are one of the best ways you can use when holding a large meeting that requires many attendees. If you plan to host such a meeting, you may wonder how long it might last you. As such, it makes it easier to time yourself and also know the meeting you will hold.

The time Microsoft Teams Meetings last depends on the kind of version of the Microsoft Teams. If you are using the free version of Microsoft Teams, the meeting will last up to 60 minutes. But currently, the meeting has a 24-hour time limit, and you can have it for an unlimited period for the paid version.

When using Microsoft Teams, you also have the option of “Meet Now” meetings. For such meetings, they will automatically expire after 8 hours. Therefore, once you start your meeting at around 7 AM, you may not access the meeting after 3 PM.

Also, there are regular and recurring meetings. You can have regular and recurring meetings that have an end time and those with no end time. For the regular meetings with an end time, they will expire 60 days after the end time, while regular and recurring meetings with no end time will expire 60 days after the start time.

If the meeting is recurring and has an end time, it will expire 60 days after the last occurrence of the meeting. Therefore, it is clear that the period during which the Microsoft Teams meeting will last will depend on the type of meeting you are holding, but most of them tend to expire after 60 days. Therefore, you can access the meetings and watch the discussions you missed in the recording during this period.

How Long Do Microsoft Teams Chat Last?

Microsoft teams have various retention policies that help you manage how long you want to stay with your data. The retention policy also affects the chats through Microsoft Teams. Microsoft teams have various settings that you can use to manage the information you have in your organization.

For instance, you may want to keep chats exchanged through the chat section in Microsoft teams for a while. Maybe this is the industry regulation or for purposes of legal requirements. So how long you keep depends on the settings you make on Microsoft Teams.

Usually, Teams allows you to keep the chat or messages in the channel for quite some time. During this time, you can decide whether you want to delete the chats or allow them there for a while before deleting them later. The duration for retaining the Microsoft chats depends on the messages, which depends on the messages retention policies.

Typically the Microsoft Teams chat will last for an indefinite period depending on how the owners of the chats configure them. The only way to eliminate the chats is by deleting them or when the admin deletes them, or following the chat retention policy.

If you have the appropriate license, then you can apply the retention policies. If you set the teams’ retention policy to retain your chats, the messages will remain there for as long as you need. However, the users of the messages can delete their messages from the app or edit them.

Once one deletes the messages from the Teams app, they cannot see the message before anymore. However, data from the message will still be secure where only the compliance administrators can access it. Microsoft Teams also allows you to set the time you want it to retain your chats, so you will have the chats for that period before it permanently deletes them.

Conclusion

Microsoft Teams have various rules for different activities that it supports. For instance, the recording is set to expire after 21 days, while the meetings can last up to 60 days. The period recording, chats, or meetings take to expire depends on the app’s retention policies.