Local recording to your computer drive

Local recording means recording right to your computer’s drive if you have the space. This is an easy option that doesn’t require any cloud storage accounts to use.

Step 1: First, make sure Zoom local recording is enabled. Log into Zoom from your browser, and choose My Meeting Settings (this option only shows up if you are the account administrator, which is necessary to enable recording). If you’re working from a business account, the settings section may be called something slightly different, like Account Settings.

Step 2: In the Settings window, look for the Recording tab up at the top and choose this. One of the first options under Features in this section should be Local recording. Check the Status section to make sure Local recording is enabled. If not, enable it. You can also lock this setting so it remains on for all users if necessary.

Step 3: Now start a Zoom meeting as the host. Look at the tools at the bottom of the screen and you will see a round icon called Record. Select it to start recording. Some versions of Zoom will immediately give you an option to Record on this computer, which you should select for local recording. Now a notification will appear in the top left of all participant’s windows saying Recording… so everyone knows that it’s working. You can pause recording at any time as necessary.

Step 4: You don’t need to do anything else until the Zoom meeting has ended. Once you stop the meeting, a notification will pop up that says Converting the meeting recording. When this finishes – and this is the important part – it will autosave an MP4 file and an audio-only M4A file on your computer in a Zoom folder, under the name “Zoom_0.mp4” and counting up from there for additional files. You can access these recorded files with the Zoom desktop client under the Meetings section, which is generally the easiest way to view them.

However, accessing the video files directly without the client can be more complicated. It’s important that you go into the relevant folder, make sure the files have properly downloaded, and then rename them to the name/date of your meeting. If you don’t rename these files right away, it can become very easy to lose track of which file is which and cause a lot of confusion later on.

It’s also important to note that the file will appear in this Zoom folder even if the meeting isn’t fully converted for viewing yet. This is handy if something happens to interrupt the conversion process or if converting right after the meeting isn’t working for you, because you can simply click on the file to start the conversion process over again.

Recording a video to the cloud

Recording a video to the cloud is also an option, but only if you are a licensed user with the Zoom desktop client or app and enough cloud space in your plan (usually around 1GB per user, which is quite limiting). This means you can’t automatically record to popular cloud storage services like Dropbox, and if you want to do any type of regular recording you’ll have to pay for a Zoom cloud storage plan, which start at $40 per month.

If all those caveats are alright with you, enabling cloud recording itself is very easy. Back in the Recording tab, where we showed you how to enable local recording, there should be an option further down to enable Cloud recording as well. Make sure it’s turned on.

Then, when you select Record during a meeting, when the options pop up choose Record to the Cloud. The video will once again process after the meeting is finished, but this time it will upload to Zoom’s cloud, and Zoom will send you an email about it.