A guide for records officers and FOI coordinators

Are Teams meeting recordings records? Capturing, transcribing, and redacting them for an access request

The meeting moved to Teams and someone pressed Record. What that file is in law, where Microsoft keeps it, why it may delete itself before a request arrives, and how to review and release it — for records officers, FOI coordinators, and the IT administrators who set the policies.

By Steve Goodyear, founder of Realizer Services Published September 3, 2026

Most of a public body's meetings now happen in Microsoft Teams, and a growing share of them are recorded — sometimes deliberately, often because a policy records webinars and town halls by default, and increasingly because someone wanted the transcript for the minutes. Each of those recordings is a file in somebody's OneDrive, with a transcript beside it, an expiry date on it, and a set of permissions that decide who can even see it. This guide answers the four questions an access office meets when a request lands for "the recording of the meeting": Is it a record? Where is it and who holds it? Will it still exist? And how do you review and release a video the way you would release a memo?

Yes, they are records

Access laws define a record by the information it holds, not by its container, and most of them were drafted broadly enough to cover formats their authors never saw. Canada's Access to Information Act defines a record as "any documentary material, regardless of medium or form." Ontario's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act defines a record as "any record of information however recorded, whether in printed form, on film, by electronic means or otherwise," and, in the definition as amended in 2026, expressly includes "data, in any form" and any record "stored in digital form or in other intangible form by electronic, magnetic, optical or any other means," together with anything that can be produced from a machine-readable record. The United Kingdom's Freedom of Information Act 2000 applies to "information recorded in any form." The US Freedom of Information Act defines a record to include information that would be an agency record "when maintained by an agency in any format, including an electronic format," and the Federal Records Act defines records as "all recorded information, regardless of form or characteristics." State public-records laws follow the same pattern; California's definition of a writing covers "every other means of recording upon any tangible thing any form of communication or representation," including sounds.

So a Teams recording of a meeting held by a public body, on a matter within its mandate, is a record of that body. So is the transcript Teams generates alongside it, and so are Copilot meeting notes and recaps. None of that decides whether the recording must be disclosed; that is the job of the exemptions. It does decide that the recording must be searched for, that it is subject to the retention schedule, and that "we don't treat videos as records" is not a position an oversight body will accept. Where a jurisdiction imposes a duty to document decisions, the recording is often the best evidence that the duty was met.

Where Microsoft keeps them, and who holds them

The storage rules are precise, and they determine who the custodian is. According to Microsoft's documentation for Teams administrators:

Scheduled and ad hoc meetings save to the organizer's OneDrive, in a folder named Recordings, "even if the organizer didn't attend the meeting." Co-organizers get the same editing rights.
Channel meetings save to the channel's SharePoint site, in a Recordings folder inside the channel's document library. Permissions follow the channel's membership.
1:1 and group calls save to the OneDrive of the person who pressed Record.
Meetings scheduled from a shared mailbox treat the mailbox as the organizer; because shared mailboxes rarely have a OneDrive, the recording usually lands in a co-organizer's or the recording initiator's OneDrive instead.
Where nobody involved has a OneDrive, the recording goes to temporary "async media storage" and is deleted after 21 days if no one downloads it.

Two consequences follow for an access office. First, the organizer is the custodian. A records search that covers shared drives, the department's SharePoint sites, and the email of the people named in the request will not find a recording sitting in one organizer's personal OneDrive; the search protocol has to name the organizer and ask for it. Second, access is narrower than people assume. Invitees from the same organization get read access to a meeting recording automatically, but external participants have no access unless the organizer shares it, and for large meetings some participants are not on the shared list at all. The person who asks "can you just send me the recording" may not be able to.

The transcript lives with the recording. When transcription is on during the meeting, Teams stores a time-coded, speaker-attributed transcript beside the video, exposes it in the Recordings and Transcripts tab, and indexes both through Microsoft 365 search and Purview eDiscovery. Microsoft's guidance for eDiscovery names recordings and transcripts explicitly. A one-hour recording is roughly 400 MB.

The expiration trap

The rule most likely to embarrass a records program is the one nobody in the records program set. Teams meeting recordings and transcripts carry an automatic expiration. Microsoft's documentation states that they "have a default expiration time of 120 days"; when that date arrives, OneDrive or SharePoint moves the file to the recycle bin, where a work account keeps it for 93 days unless an administrator changed that setting, after which "they cannot be recovered." Changing the policy affects only new recordings; the expiration on an existing one cannot be altered through the policy. Microsoft supports auto-applying Purview retention labels to meeting recordings and their transcripts, which is the records-management control a schedule should rest on; Microsoft frames the expiration setting itself as storage hygiene. A records officer should read it as a disposition rule with no authority behind it: an access request that arrives after the expiry window will be answered "no responsive records exist" for a meeting everyone remembers, and the audit trail will show a system deleting a public record on a timer.

There are three fixes, and they belong to different people. The Teams administrator can change the expiration policy — the value runs from 1 to 99,999 days, and a PowerShell value of -1 makes recordings never expire — or turn the automatic-expiry setting off. The records manager can auto-apply Purview retention labels to meeting recordings and their transcripts, which Microsoft supports specifically for this file type, so the retention schedule is the documented rule for the file — confirming with the Teams administrator that the label and the expiration setting do not pull in opposite directions. And the organization can decide, as policy, which meetings are recorded at all: Microsoft records webinars and town halls automatically unless the organizer turns it off, and offers an explicit-consent setting that asks participants to agree before a meeting is recorded or transcribed. Whatever the choice, it should be a choice, documented, and consistent with the retention schedule for the class of meeting.

What tends to be exempt, and what does not

A recording is reviewed under the same exemptions as any other record, and three come up constantly. The first is personal information: every participant's face, voice, and name, the people discussed, and anything on a shared screen. In a meeting recording that is not a handful of redactions, it is the whole surface of the record, which is why severance is done by span and region rather than by page. The second is advice, recommendations, and deliberation — Canada's section 21, Ontario's section 13, the UK's sections 35 and 36, US Exemption 5's deliberative-process privilege. A recorded discussion is deliberation in its purest form, but the exemption protects advice and the give-and-take of decision-making, not the facts recited or the decision announced, so the duty to sever applies with full force. The third is third-party and confidential information shared on screen or read aloud.

What does not exempt a recording is that it is a recording. Regulators have been explicit that the effort of severing audio and video is a cost of doing business, not a ground for refusal: British Columbia's Information and Privacy Commissioner wrote in its January 2026 surveillance guidelines that "lacking the capacity to blur or sever information to respond to an FOI request is not a valid reason under FIPPA to excuse a public body from performing this task," and Ontario's Commissioner has ordered recordings released with individuals obscured and voices distorted rather than withheld. The regulators' expectations for that work are set out in the companion guide on redacting body-worn camera and 911 audio.

Reviewing and redacting a recording

The practical problem is time. The Canada Border Services Agency's published estimate is four to six analyst-hours for every hour of video, and in the one measurement that reached a court record a California city spent 35.3 hours editing exempt material out of six hours of body-worn camera footage. A meeting recording is worse than a body-worn clip in one respect: it is almost all speech. Listening to an hour of meeting in real time, twice, to find the three minutes that name a third party is the work the transcript exists to remove. A defensible workflow looks like this:

Capture the recording and its transcript together, from the organizer's OneDrive or the channel site, and record the source. The Teams transcript is the transcript of record for that meeting; a second, machine-generated transcript adds errors without adding evidence.
Review from the transcript. Find every name, every reference to an identifiable person, and every passage of advice by searching the text, then confirm each one against the audio at that timestamp.
Sever by span and region. Mute, bleep, or distort the voice for a span where the words are exempt; distort rather than mute where the regulator expects the content to remain audible. Blur or box a camera tile or a shared screen for the span it shows exempt content. Withhold the whole recording only where severing would leave nothing of substance — the point at which Ontario's Commissioner has long accepted that severance is not required.
Cite the exemption on every mark, with the alternates, so the redaction index and the redaction log list each span, its effect, and its authority. Where the statute asks that the amount deleted and the exemption be indicated at the place in the record where the deletion is made, a caption in the frame at the span does exactly that.
Release a rendered copy, not the original. The released MP4 or MP3 should be a new file with the marks burned in, accompanied by a manifest of file hashes and the redaction log, and the original should never have been modified. The transcript is a separate record with its own review; release it only if it has been severed to match.

Fees follow the statute rather than the effort. Washington's Public Records Act allows a charge for redacting, distorting, and pixelating body-worn camera recordings and excludes that time from the agency's response limits; the UK's fees regulations count only determining whether information is held, locating, retrieving, and extracting it toward the cost limit, so redaction time cannot be charged or used to support a cost-limit refusal; California's Supreme Court has held that redacting electronic records is not chargeable "data extraction"; Canada's federal regulations prescribe only the $5 application fee; Ontario charges no search or preparation time for a requester's own personal information. An estimate of the review hours is worth producing in every case, because it tells the office what the request will cost even where it cannot be recovered.

A short checklist for records officers

Decide which classes of meeting are recorded, and write the decision down. Turn automatic recording off for events where it is not wanted; turn explicit consent on where your privacy office requires it.
Align the Teams expiration policy with the retention schedule, and auto-apply retention labels to recordings and transcripts so the schedule wins over the timer.
Name the organizer as the custodian in every search protocol that could touch a recorded meeting, and ask for the transcript with the recording.
Treat Copilot recaps, notes, and interaction history as records on the same footing as the transcript.
Review from the transcript, sever by span and region, cite the exemption on every mark, and release a rendered copy with a manifest and a redaction log.

How AccessPoint handles it

AccessPoint captures a Teams meeting recording from the organizer's own Microsoft 365 through the same Add from Microsoft 365 picker that captures email, calendars, OneNote, Teams chats, and Copilot history. Microsoft Graph lists recordings for the organizer only, the MP4 downloads through the user's browser into the request, and the Teams transcript comes with it and is treated as authoritative — the recording is never transcribed a second time. From there it is a document like any other: the transcript drawer finds a spoken name and seeks the player to it; marks are made by span and region with box, blur, pixelate, mute, bleep, or voice distortion; each mark carries its exemption, alternates, approval, and audit entry; and the response package renders a burned MP4 with the citation captioned in the frame, a manifest of every file's hash, and a per-span redaction log. Nothing leaves the organization's tenant, and the Fees panel estimates the review time from the recording's duration before anyone starts.

Last reviewed: September 2026.

Sources

Teams meeting recording and transcript storage and permissions in OneDrive and SharePoint — Microsoft Learn (updated August 2026; accessed September 2026).
Manage Teams recording policies for meetings and events — Microsoft Learn (accessed September 2026).
Manage Teams meeting recording expiration — Microsoft Learn (accessed September 2026).
Access to Information Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. A-1, section 3 ("record") — Justice Laws Canada.
Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. F.31, section 2(1) ("record") — Ontario e-Laws.
Freedom of Information Act 2000, section 84 ("information") — legislation.gov.uk.
5 U.S.C. § 552(f)(2) ("record") and 44 U.S.C. § 3301(a)(1) ("records") — Legal Information Institute, Cornell.
California Government Code § 7920.545 ("writing") — California Legislative Information.
Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, regulation 4(3) — legislation.gov.uk.
National Lawyers Guild v. City of Hayward, S252445 (Cal. May 28, 2020) — Supreme Court of California.
Automated redaction of video recordings for the purposes of Access to Information requests (Innovative Solutions Canada challenge, Canada Border Services Agency) — Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (accessed September 2026).
Public sector surveillance guidelines (January 14, 2026) — Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia.

Related reading on this site: the companion guide on redacting body-worn camera and 911 audio; video and audio redaction software and what to look for in any tool; running the whole program in Microsoft 365; the documentation for video and audio records in AccessPoint; or book a demo to see a Teams recording captured, reviewed, and released.

Teams Recording Questions

Are Microsoft Teams meeting recordings subject to freedom of information requests?

In every major regime, yes. Access laws define a record by what it holds, not by its format: Canada's Access to Information Act covers any documentary material regardless of medium or form, Ontario's FIPPA covers any record of information however recorded, whether in printed form, on film, by electronic means or otherwise, the UK's FOIA covers information recorded in any form, and the US FOIA definition of a record includes information maintained in any format, including electronic. A recording of a meeting held by a public body is a record of that body, and so is the transcript generated alongside it. Whether it must be disclosed is a separate question answered by the exemptions, not by the fact that it is a video.

Where does Microsoft store a Teams meeting recording?

For scheduled and ad hoc meetings, the recording and its transcript save to the organizer's OneDrive, in a Recordings folder, even if the organizer did not attend. Channel meetings save to the channel's SharePoint site in a Recordings folder. A 1:1 call saves to the OneDrive of whoever pressed Record. A meeting scheduled from a shared mailbox usually lands in a co-organizer's or the recording initiator's OneDrive. That matters for a records search: the recording belongs to a person's OneDrive, so the organizer is the custodian, and a search of shared drives alone will not find it.

Do Teams recordings delete themselves?

By default, yes. Microsoft's documentation gives meeting recordings and transcripts a default expiration of 120 days; on that date the file moves to the OneDrive or SharePoint recycle bin, where a work account keeps it for 93 days before it is gone for good, unless an administrator has changed the policy. Microsoft supports auto-applying Purview retention labels to recordings and transcripts. A records officer should treat expiration as a disposition rule that nobody in the records program authorized, align it with the retention schedule, and apply retention labels to recordings and transcripts so that a request arriving after the expiry window can still be answered.

Is the Teams transcript a record too?

Yes. When transcription is on, Teams stores a time-coded, speaker-attributed transcript with the recording, and it is retrievable through Microsoft Purview eDiscovery like any other file. It is machine-generated and can misattribute or mishear speech, so it should be released as what it is, and it can be a responsive record in its own right even where the video is withheld. Copilot meeting recaps and notes are records on the same footing.

How long does it take to redact a recording, and what does it cost?

The Canada Border Services Agency's published estimate is four to six analyst-hours per hour of video, and in the one measurement that reached a court record, the City of Hayward spent 35.3 hours editing exempt material out of six hours of body-worn camera footage with a desktop video editor. Whether the time is chargeable depends on the statute: Washington's Public Records Act allows charging for redacting body-worn camera recordings and excludes the time from response limits, the UK's fees regulations do not count redaction toward the cost limit, California's Supreme Court held in that same Hayward case that redaction is not chargeable, Canada's federal regulations prescribe only a $5 application fee, and Ontario charges no search or preparation time for a requester's own personal information. A transcript that lets a reviewer find spoken names, and detection that proposes faces and on-screen text, are what bring the hours down.