Key takeaways
- No Microsoft report totals recorded hours: search OneDrive and SharePoint for MP4 files in Microsoft Purview eDiscovery and divide the total size by about 400 MB per hour.
- Recordings go to the organizer's OneDrive, channel meetings to the team's SharePoint site, and calls to the OneDrive of whoever pressed Record, so a search has to cover all three places.
- Recordings and transcripts expire after 120 days by default and wait 93 days in the recycle bin, so older years may already be gone; changing the policy affects only new recordings.
- You don't need to export anything to apply: have your estimated hours, years of history and organizer count ready, and the data vendor anonymizes the transcripts before any AI lab sees them.
01
What are Teams meeting recordings, and why do AI labs and data vendors buy them?
The short answer
Teams meeting recordings are video and audio files of meetings that people recorded in Microsoft Teams, often with a written transcript of what was said. AI labs (companies that build and train AI models) and data vendors (companies that anonymize business records and package them for those labs) buy a copy because the recordings capture decisions and explanations spoken aloud, such as internal reviews, customer calls and training sessions, which written records rarely contain.
What a recorded Teams meeting leaves behind
When someone presses Record in a Teams meeting, Teams saves the meeting as an MP4 file, a standard video format. If transcription was switched on, Teams also saves a transcript, which is a text file of the words spoken with the time each was said and who said it. Both files are stored in the company's OneDrive or SharePoint, not inside Teams itself.
Over the years a company that records its meetings builds up a library of these files: weekly reviews, sales calls with customers, training sessions and project check-ins.
Why a recorded meeting teaches an AI model something
An AI model learns by studying a very large number of examples and finding the patterns in them, and those examples are called training data. Most written records show only the outcome of a discussion, while a recording shows the discussion itself: a customer explaining a problem, a manager walking a team through a decision, a trainer showing how a task is done.
A recording of a channel meeting is saved on the same SharePoint site as that team's files, which links the spoken discussion to the documents it produced. Why AI companies want your data explains why labs pay for records of how work is really done.
How recordings fit into a dataset
Recordings are priced as one part of a whole dataset, not on their own. micro1, the data vendor we typically refer companies to, pays them $100K to $2M or more per dataset, and the figure depends on the years of history and how completely the records show each job.
Recordings sit in OneDrive and SharePoint, and the chat that went with each meeting sits in Microsoft Teams. The Microsoft 365 overview shows how these fit together, and what your data is worth explains how the pieces add up.
02
Where can you find how many hours of Teams recordings you have?
The short answer
No Microsoft report totals recorded hours. An admin instead searches for MP4 files in the Microsoft Purview portal under eDiscovery > Cases, covering the organizers' OneDrive accounts and the team SharePoint sites, then divides the total size by Microsoft's planning figure of about 400 MB per hour. The Microsoft 365 admin center usage report for OneDrive shows where large recording libraries sit.
How to estimate your recorded hours
The steps below turn storage into hours, because file size is the only measure Microsoft provides. They use Microsoft's guidance on where Teams stores recordings.
- Start in the Microsoft 365 admin center: choose Reports > Usage, then the OneDrive report, and read Storage used (MB) for each person. Large figures point to people who organize many recorded meetings.
- For a figure that covers only recordings, create a Microsoft Purview eDiscovery search of the organizers' OneDrive accounts and the team SharePoint sites. Limit it to the mp4 file extension and to your date range.
- Convert the search results to hours by dividing their combined size by roughly 400 MB, the figure Microsoft uses when planning storage for one hour of recording. Results totaling 200 GB, for example, come to roughly 500 hours.
Who can see what
Each part of the process needs a different role, and the sizing relies on eDiscovery, which is Microsoft's tool for searching a company's records for legal and compliance work.
| Task | What it needs |
|---|---|
| Read storage in the usage report | A role such as Reports Reader, SharePoint Administrator or Global Administrator |
| Search for and export MP4 files | eDiscovery permissions and a Microsoft 365 Enterprise E3 or E5 license |
| Pull recordings and transcripts with code | Admin-approved permissions: OnlineMeetingRecording.Read.All and OnlineMeetingTranscript.Read.All |
Where each recording is saved
The place a recording lands depends on the kind of meeting, and that decides where you must search. Meetings and events save to the organizer's OneDrive, even when the organizer did not attend. Channel meetings save to the team's SharePoint site, and calls save to the OneDrive of the person who pressed Record.
If the organizer has no OneDrive, Teams tries the co-organizers in the order listed in the meeting options, then the person who started the recording. When none of them has a OneDrive, the recording goes to temporary storage and is deleted if nobody downloads it within 21 days.
Why the total can fall short
Recordings and transcripts expire after 120 days by default, unless your meeting policy changed that, so older years may already be gone. Expired files move to the recycle bin of the OneDrive or SharePoint site they were saved in, and work accounts keep them there for 93 days unless an admin changed that.
A search therefore finds only what has survived. The oldest recording an eDiscovery search returns marks the real start of your usable history, whatever year your company began recording.
03
What should you know about your Teams recordings before you apply?
The short answer
Have three facts ready: how many hours of meetings you have recorded, how many years the recordings cover and how many people organize recorded meetings. They go into the data manifest, the written summary of which apps hold your records, how many years each covers and roughly how much. You don't need to run an export to find them.
The hours recorded
The unit for recordings is hours. Work them out from the combined MP4 size using about 400 MB for each hour, unless you hold exact meeting lengths, and label the number an estimate.
The years of history
The years of history run from the date of your oldest recording. Because recordings expire after 120 days by default, the oldest one you can find may be much newer than the day your company first used Teams.
The number of seats
Seats are the people who organize recorded meetings, since recordings land in the organizer's OneDrive. Count them from the OneDrives that hold recordings, or ask IT which people record regularly.
What you don't need to do first
You don't need to export anything to apply, and you don't need to clean or scrub an export. The data vendor anonymizes the records before anyone else sees them, and nothing moves until a lawyer-reviewed license is signed. The application, the intro call and each later step are laid out in how to sell your company's data.
04
How do you export your Teams meeting recordings?
The short answer
An admin with eDiscovery permissions and a Microsoft 365 Enterprise E3 or E5 license runs a search for MP4 recordings in OneDrive and SharePoint in the Microsoft Purview portal, exports it with Export items with items report and downloads the packages within 14 days. Developers can instead call the getAllRecordings and getAllTranscripts calls in Microsoft Graph for each organizer. Recordings come as MP4 and transcripts as VTT or DOCX files.
Before you start: recordings expire
Recordings and transcripts expire on a timer, so check the setting first. In the Teams admin center, go to Meetings > Meeting policies, open the policy and look under Recording & transcription for Recordings and transcriptions automatically expire. Its Default expiration time is 120 days, and Microsoft's page on managing the recording expiration policy explains the options.
Changing the setting affects only new recordings, never existing ones. The value can be 1 to 99999 days, and an admin using PowerShell can enter -1 so that recordings never expire. Whether to keep future recordings longer is a decision for your IT and legal teams.
The eDiscovery steps
- Open eDiscovery > Cases in the Microsoft Purview portal, run a search for MP4 recordings across OneDrive and SharePoint, and choose Export on it.
- Pick the export type Export items with items report and the package sizes you want. When the job finishes, fetch the packages from its Overview tab inside 14 days.
The search needs the right places in scope. Include the organizers' OneDrive accounts, the SharePoint sites of any teams that hold channel meetings, and the OneDrive of anyone who recorded a call, because call recordings go to the person who pressed Record and not to an organizer. Microsoft's page on finding Teams content in eDiscovery describes searching by organizer, date range and file extension.
The Microsoft Graph route
Developers can use the Teams Export APIs in Microsoft Graph, Microsoft's programming interface for its cloud services, to pull recordings and transcripts directly. They call getAllRecordings and getAllTranscripts once for each meeting organizer, using the OnlineMeetingRecording.Read.All and OnlineMeetingTranscript.Read.All permissions. An administrator must approve those permissions, and the Teams Export APIs guide lists them.
Microsoft documents these calls for private scheduled meetings only, so other meeting types need an eDiscovery export. Recordings download as MP4. Transcripts come as VTT by default, a plain-text format with a timestamp on every line, or as DOCX if you ask for it.
What the files look like and how large they are
Microsoft's storage planning figure for a one-hour recording is about 400 MB, and recordings count against the OneDrive and SharePoint storage quotas. A library of a few hundred hours is therefore a large export, measured in hundreds of gigabytes. Set the package size when you export, and split big jobs by date range so no export runs longer than seven days, because longer exports are cancelled.
What a recordings export leaves out
An export finds only recordings that still exist. Meetings nobody recorded are not there, recordings that expired and were purged from the recycle bin cannot be recovered, and a recording left in temporary storage is deleted after 21 days. If an owner deleted a recording, the owner or an admin can restore it from the recycle bin of the OneDrive or SharePoint site while it is still there.
The chat that happened during a meeting belongs to the Teams messages, not to the recording, so it is covered on the Microsoft Teams page. Microsoft also notes that closed captions are not fully supported if a recording is moved or copied from its original location, so keep the transcript file alongside it.
Check consent before licensing recordings
Whether the people on a call agreed to be recorded affects what a company may license, and the rules differ by place and by who was on the call. This is a question for the company's lawyer, and is it legal to sell company data covers it.
How long an export takes
Microsoft gives no fixed time, and video exports take longest. Download the finished packages promptly, since they are deleted 14 days after creation.
Sources: Microsoft Learn pages Teams meeting recording and transcript storage and permissions and Manage Teams recording expiration policy, then Export content with the Microsoft Teams Export APIs, Finding content in Microsoft Teams in eDiscovery and Export search results in eDiscovery. Steps checked against these pages in November 2026.
05
What stays private when Teams recordings are licensed?
The short answer
The company picks the organizers and channel sites that the search covers, which keeps sensitive meetings out. The data vendor replaces names in transcripts with consistent stand-ins, and voices and faces in video need different tools or are left out. The company keeps ownership of its recordings, and the license covers defined records for a defined use.
You choose what is in scope
An eDiscovery search only collects the organizers and channel sites you put into it. A company can leave out its HR, legal and board meetings and license only training sessions or customer calls. The data vendor also deletes records too sensitive to clean safely instead of anonymizing them.
Names are replaced before a lab sees them
Anonymization means replacing every detail that identifies a person, such as a name or an email address, with a stand-in that is the same every time it appears. A transcript still reads in order, so a lab can learn from it, but it no longer says who the speakers are. The diagram below shows a short transcript before and after.
What happens to voices and faces
A video holds more than words. Voices and faces identify people, and they need different tools from text, so a data vendor may use only the transcripts, or leave out the recordings that cannot be cleaned safely. The method is in how company data is anonymized for AI training, and exclusions are a normal topic for the first call.
Ownership and payment
Licensing gives the buyer limited rights to a copy, while the company keeps ownership of the originals. The terms that matter, such as exclusivity, permitted use and deletion, are covered in data licensing. micro1 pays in full within 30 days of accepting the data, usually as a single payment.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Where are Teams meeting recordings saved?
Meeting and event recordings go to the Recordings folder of the organizer's OneDrive. Channel meeting recordings go to the Recordings folder of the team's SharePoint site, and a recorded call goes to the OneDrive of the person who pressed Record.
Do Teams recordings delete themselves?
Yes, unless the policy was changed. With the default policy, a recording and its transcript expire after 120 days and are moved to the recycle bin. An admin can adjust or switch off expiry in the Teams admin center, and that affects only recordings made afterwards.
How big is a Teams meeting recording?
Microsoft's planning figure is about 400 MB for a one-hour recording. The files count against your OneDrive and SharePoint storage quotas.
Can we recover recordings that have already expired?
Sometimes. An expired recording sits in the recycle bin of the OneDrive or SharePoint site for 93 days on a work account, unless an admin changed that, and the owner or an admin can restore it during that time. After the recycle bin is purged, it cannot be recovered.
Are meeting transcripts exported with the recordings?
Transcripts are separate files saved next to the recordings, so an eDiscovery search for the right locations can collect them. Through Microsoft Graph they come as VTT by default or DOCX on request.
Do we need to export recordings before we apply?
No. The application takes about two minutes and shares no data. You only need your approximate hours, your years of history and the number of people who organize recorded meetings for the intro call, and an estimate is fine. The full export is needed later, when the records are transferred after you sign the license.
Can we leave sensitive meetings out?
Yes. You choose which organizers and channel sites the eDiscovery search covers, so HR, legal and board meetings can stay out of the export.
What are Teams recordings worth to AI labs and data vendors?
Recordings are priced as part of a whole dataset rather than on their own. Companies are paid $100K to $2M or more per dataset, according to micro1, and the price depends on the years of history and how completely the records show each job. What your data is worth explains the factors.
Bottom line
Know what is in Teams meeting recordings, then see what it is worth
You don't need to export anything to apply. Apply in two minutes, describe your records on the intro call, and micro1, the data vendor we typically refer companies to, prices the whole dataset and sends an offer 1–2 days later.
Not legal, tax or financial advice. Figures come from micro1's published pages and public reporting as of November 2026.