Update to the Zoom Recording Retention Process

When the demand for Zoom meetings, classes and office hours spiked in April 2020, the amount of space required to store the subsequent recordings increased dramatically. Drexel IT worked closely with Zoom over the next year to steadily procure additional space to accommodate this demand. However, it soon became apparent that continuously expanding the Zoom cloud storage capacity was not sustainable and Drexel IT began implementing a 3-stage plan to leverage existing University systems to reduce our reliance on the Zoom cloud.

Stage 1 was the integration of the Zoom recording process with Drexel Streams (aka Kaltura), a media hosting platform (similar to YouTube) which was already established at the university and has no storage limits. This stage was successfully implemented in May 2021 after which time any new recordings made in Zoom were automatically uploaded to the meeting host’s Drexel Streams account.

Stage 2 involved revisiting an 18 week (126 day) storage limit for recordings in the Zoom cloud originally proposed to begin in March 2020, but was postponed due to the pandemic. Before the limit could be imposed, however, Drexel IT wanted to ensure no recordings were lost. To do this, they began in June 2021 to copy all Zoom cloud recordings that were older than June 1, 2021 to a Zoom Recordings folder in each host’s OneDrive cloud storage account.

The copying of Zoom cloud recordings to OneDrive was completed within 3 weeks and, on July 1, 2021, Drexel IT implemented Stage 3 which was the enforcement of the 18 week storage limit. From this point forward, only the previous 18 weeks recordings would appear in the Zoom cloud with all others being hosted on Drexel Streams. Any links that point to Zoom recordings older than 18 weeks will no longer work.

To help everyone during this transition, LeBow Instructional Tech and LeBow Tech have created a series of tutorials which will help you navigate the new Zoom recording landscape. Links for these tutorials can be found below:

• Locating Zoom Recordings Made Before June 1, 2021 - http://lebow.me/ZoomRecordingsinOneDrive
• Adding Videos to Drexel Streams and Blackboard - http://lebow.me/DrexelStreamsUpload
• Adding Captions to Drexel Streams Videos - http://lebow.me/CaptionsinDrexelStreams

If you have any questions about this retention policy or the process of accessing older recordings, please contact either LeBow Tech (lcbtech@drexel.edu) or LeBow Instructional Tech (lebowintech@drexel.edu).