It depends on which kind of recording Zoom made. A local recording is saved to a Zoom folder inside your Documents folder on the computer you recorded from. A cloud recording is not on your computer at all: it is in your Zoom account, under Recordings in the web portal.
If you have looked in both and found nothing, work through the checks below before assuming it is lost. Most missing recordings turn out to be on a different machine, in the other place, or stuck mid-conversion.
On Windows, the default location is a folder called Zoom inside Documents. Inside that you get one subfolder per meeting, named with the date and the meeting title, and inside that the actual files.
You will usually see an MP4 with the video, a separate audio-only file, and a playlist file. If the meeting was long or the machine was slow, you may also see a file ending in .zoom, which matters and is covered below.
Do not assume the default path is your path. Zoom lets you change where recordings are stored, and installers set up by an IT department often do. Open Zoom, go to Settings, then Recording, and the folder is listed there with a button to open it. That is the authoritative answer for your machine, rather than anything a web page can tell you.
Cloud recording is a paid feature, so if you are on a free Zoom account, this is not where your file went. On a paid plan, sign in to Zoom in a browser and look under Recordings. The file is there, not on your computer, until you download it.
This is the part that catches people out later. Cloud recordings are subject to storage limits and, in a company account, to a retention policy an administrator sets. A recording can quietly disappear months after the meeting because the retention window ran out, and nothing about the meeting itself warned you that was going to happen.
It went to the cloud and you are looking locally, or the reverse. Zoom remembers whichever option you picked last. Check both before anything else.
You recorded from a different machine. A local recording only exists on the computer that made it. If you joined that call from your laptop and you are now searching your desktop, the file was never here.
The conversion never finished. Zoom writes the recording in its own format during the call and converts it to MP4 afterwards. If Zoom closed, the machine slept, or it crashed before that finished, you are left with a .zoom file that no video player will open. Open Zoom, go to the Recorded tab in Meetings, find the meeting and choose Convert. It usually works.
You were not the host. If you were not the host and nobody granted you recording permission, Zoom did not record anything on your behalf. There is no file, in either location. This is the one where people search the longest before accepting it.
Someone deleted it, or a policy did. Deleted cloud recordings sit in a trash area for a limited period before being removed for good, so look there. After that window, or once an admin retention rule has run, the file is not recoverable and no amount of searching changes that.
Then it is gone, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. There is no trick that brings back a cloud recording past its retention window.
What is worth doing is asking why it was possible to lose it. A recording that only ever existed on someone else's servers can be removed by a storage limit, a retention policy, a lapsed subscription, or a company you have no relationship with. You had access to it rather than a copy of it, and those are different things.
Recording from your own computer sidesteps the whole question. The file is written to a folder on your own disk as the meeting happens, and it is still there afterwards regardless of your plan, your role in the call, or anyone's retention policy.
That is how Jotted works. It records the meeting from your desktop rather than joining it, so it does not matter whether you are the host, and the recording is a file you own on a drive you own. On the free plan nothing is uploaded anywhere at all. There is more detail on where recordings are stored and what happens if you cancel, including the parts that are less convenient.
None of which helps you find today's missing file. For that, work back through the five checks above, starting with the folder listed in your own Zoom settings.
By default, local recordings go to a Zoom folder inside your Documents folder, in a subfolder named after the date and title of the meeting. You can confirm or change the exact path in Zoom under Settings, then Recording.
The most common reasons are that the recording went to the cloud rather than your computer, that it was saved on a different machine because you recorded from somewhere else, or that the conversion step never finished. An unconverted recording sits in the folder as a .zoom file rather than an MP4.
Sometimes. Zoom keeps deleted cloud recordings in a trash area for a limited window before removing them permanently, so check there first. Once that window passes, or if an admin retention policy removed the file, it is gone.
Cloud recording is a paid feature, so on a free account your recordings are local ones saved to your own computer. Plans and storage limits change, so check Zoom's own pricing page for the current position.
If you were not the host and were not given recording permission, Zoom did not make a recording for you at all, so there is no file to find. Recording your own screen instead puts the file on your computer regardless of your role in the call.
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