To prevent overextending our organization’s Zoom Cloud video storage going forward, the SI Team is instituting the following policy and procedure, so we don’t incur increased expense for additional storage or have to limit account capabilities.

The SI Team will, effective April 1, 2023, activate settings within the org-wide Zoom account to only retain Zoom video recordings in the cloud for a maximum of 30 days, after which time they will be auto-deleted. Hosts of Zoom sessions that are recorded to the cloud will get auto notified in advance by email when this deletion is about to occur (including the Programs account, for which notifications will be sent to programs@techtowndetroit.org). If your account contains recordings stored in the Zoom Cloud, those recordings become subject to this auto-deletion policy as of Apr 1—it is advised that you review your recordings immediately and select a maintenance option as outlined below.

To prevent losing video recordings of value, we suggest hosts/video owners proactively employ one of the following four (4) video recording/maintenance options (and we suggest also considering this proactively in the process of planning the session to be recorded.)

Recordings that don’t need to be shared or archived should be deleted altogether from the Zoom Cloud and the W Drive.

Recordings that do not need to be streamed by our community should be downloaded and archived to W Drive if they need to be retained for a purpose. The instructions for how to download video recordings from the Zoom Cloud to W Drive for archiving are still valid and can be found in this folder (authored by M. DiMercurio, Feb 2022). Once a Zoom recording has been downloaded, it should then always be deleted from Zoom storage.

Recordings that need to be shared online for our community to stream need to be moved to YouTube and removed from the Zoom cloud. On YouTube, storage is free, analytics are more robust, repurposing the video content is easier, and videos can have a more permanent home (‘cause it’s free!)

TechTown MarCom and SI have partnered to create the TechTown Programs YouTube channel* for this purpose. This channel is unlisted, and all playlists and videos added to this channel are also, by default, unlisted and should remain that way (since we are not trying to undermine any of our program offerings by creating “TechTown TV” that the public can freely consume without engaging with us in a meaningful way.) Program teams must decide who from their respective areas will be responsible for uploading content to this channel so that we can provision them access to the channel and share with them instructions for uploading and properly tagging content. Please request this provisioning via the SI Work Request Form.

Use the option to record directly to Desktop instead and forego the cloud entirely if not necessary.

✅Desktop recording of a Zoom session is still a viable option and is a good shortcut to ultimately get a recording published to the TT Programs YouTube channel to share with the community.

⚠️A regular audit and periodic maintenance of recordings in the W Drive Zoom Archive folder in critical lest storage there also becomes overrun and file maintenance becomes too unwieldy. (Storage sometimes seems endless these days but can change at any time.)

💡TIP: The same routine of audit and maintenance of videos recorded in Microsoft Teams is also advised, as each recording is owned by either the meeting owner (stored either in an individual’s OneDrive) or channel (Files > Recordings folder).

For questions or feedback related to the content of this document, contact systems@techtowndetroit.org