Where are Teams meeting transcripts stored?

In the meeting organizer's OneDrive for Business, in a folder called Recordings, for a normal meeting. In the channel's SharePoint site for a channel meeting. In the OneDrive of whoever pressed record for a one-to-one or group call. You almost never open it by browsing to the file; you open it from the meeting chat or the Recap tab. The part worth knowing is what that placement means: the transcript is a tenant file with an owner who is not you, an expiry date you did not set, and a compliance search that reaches it.

Where the file lands, by meeting type

The Teams Room row is the one that catches people out. When someone starts a meeting with Meet now from a room system, the room becomes the organizer, so the file lands in the room account's OneDrive and none of the humans in the meeting hold full permissions on it. Microsoft's own advice for avoiding that is to not give the room resource account a OneDrive license, at which point the file falls to a co-organizer instead.

The fallback chain nobody documents in the meeting

When the organizer has no OneDrive account, the file does not fail. It walks a chain. First it tries the co-organizers in the order they appear in Meeting options: the first one with a OneDrive account gets it, and if they have none it moves to the second, then the third. If no co-organizer has one, it goes to the account of whoever started the recording. If that person has no OneDrive either, it lands in temporary async storage, no further upload is attempted, and it is deleted after 21 days.

This matters when you go looking for something that has vanished, because the obvious place to search is the organizer's files, and the obvious place can be wrong.

Who can read it

For a normal meeting, the organizer has full permissions, co-organizers can edit and share, and everyone else from the organizer's organization gets read access without sharing or download rights. External participants get nothing by default; the organizer has to share it with them deliberately. Channel meetings work differently, inheriting whatever the channel's SharePoint permissions already are, which means anyone with access to that channel has access to the transcript.

Two edge cases are worth knowing. In a meeting with more than 250 participants, some attendees do not get file permissions automatically and have to ask the owner. And separately from all of this, eDiscovery search covers recordings and transcripts, so compliance can read the text of the call without anyone sharing anything.

How long it survives

Recordings and transcripts expire together on a default of 120 days. An admin can set the value anywhere from 1 day to 99,999 days, or use the PowerShell-only value of -1 so they never expire, and changes only apply to files created after the change. Academic A1 tenants cap at 30 days. A Purview retention label can be set to delete them faster, down to a minimum of one day.

Expiry moves the file to the recycle bin of wherever it was stored, which is your last chance to recover it. For a work or school account, the recycle bin purges after 93 days by default, and once it purges the file cannot be recovered at all. So the real deadline is not 120 days, it is 120 plus whatever your tenant leaves on the recycle bin.

The alternative: a transcript you own

Every line above is a consequence of one decision, which is that the transcript is produced by your organization's meeting platform and therefore lives in your organization's storage. If what you want is a record of a call that is simply yours, the way to get it is to make it yourself rather than ask the platform for a copy.

That is what Parameety does. It captures the meeting's audio from your Mac's own output through ScreenCaptureKit, transcribes it on the machine with Parakeet, and writes a Markdown file to ~/Documents/Parameety named for the date and time. There is no tenant, no expiry policy, no owner other than you, and the audio is discarded once the text is written. Nothing joins the call and nothing is uploaded. The honest limits: it is a verbatim transcript with no speaker labels and no summary, it captures audio rather than video, and telling the room you are keeping a transcript is on you rather than on a platform banner.

If you are still trying to get a transcript out of Teams itself, start with how to transcribe a Teams meeting, which covers the click path and every documented reason the button is greyed out. For the capture side on a Mac, see how to record a meeting on a Mac. Zoom answers the same question in three different places depending on how the meeting was captured, set out in where Zoom transcripts are saved.

About this guide

The Teams behavior here comes from Microsoft's admin documentation rather than my own testing, because storage and expiry are tenant settings I cannot see from outside. I have stated defaults as defaults for that reason: your admin may have changed any of them, and the console is the authority. The last section is my own app, which I have tried to describe with its limits attached.

FAQ

Where do Teams meeting transcripts go?

For a normal scheduled or ad-hoc meeting, the transcript is stored in the meeting organizer's OneDrive for Business, in the Recordings folder, even if the organizer did not attend. For a channel meeting it goes to the channel's SharePoint site instead, under the team and channel's Documents library. For a one-to-one or group call, it goes to the OneDrive of whoever pressed record. You read it from the meeting chat or the Recap tab rather than by browsing to the file.

How long are Teams transcripts kept?

By default, 120 days. Microsoft's expiration setting applies to recordings and transcripts together, and an admin can set anything from one day up to 99,999, or turn expiry off so they never lapse. A Purview retention label can override that and delete them sooner, with a minimum of one day. When a transcript expires it moves to the recycle bin, and for a work or school account items there are purged after 93 days unless the admin changed it.

Can other people in my company read a Teams transcript?

Usually yes, within limits. The organizer has full permissions and can share it, co-organizers can edit and share, and other participants from the organizer's own organization get read access. External participants get no access at all unless the organizer shares it with them explicitly. Separately, transcripts are covered by eDiscovery search, so a compliance search can surface what was said even if nobody shared the file with you.

Why has my Teams transcript disappeared?

The likely causes, in order: it expired under the 120-day default, the organizer deleted it, or a retention policy removed it. There is also a quieter case. If the organizer had no OneDrive account, the file falls through to the first co-organizer who does, then to whoever started the recording, and if none of them has one it goes to temporary storage and is deleted after 21 days. Check the recycle bin of the account the file actually landed in, not your own.