Where Microsoft Teams and Google Meet store your transcript, recording and summary — and how to keep them after the call

Where did Teams put the transcript? is what people type into a search box the day after a meeting, and the honest answer is: not where the recording went. The tooling did its job — a transcript with names and time stamps, a summary, action items with owners. Then you filed the recording somewhere sensible, a SharePoint library or a shared drive, and the rest of it didn't come along. Or a colleague on Linux, in another tenant, or on the phone dial-in, opens the link and sees nothing.

Nobody made a mistake. On the major platforms a meeting does not produce one artifact, it produces three or four, each with its own storage location, its own permission list, its own expiry policy and — for the AI summary — its own license. "Preserving the meeting" means preserving all of them, in place, with the right people still attached.

This post is the documented map: where each vendor puts each artifact, who can still open it afterwards, what breaks when it moves, and what the alternative looks like when the meeting is a place rather than a folder of files. Vendor facts are from their own help pages, checked September 2026; links are in the footer.

Microsoft Teams: four objects, four rulebooks

The recording. For meetings and events, "the recording saves to the organizer's OneDrive, even if the organizer didn't attend the meeting or event." For channel meetings it goes somewhere else entirely — "the recording is stored in the SharePoint Teams site documentation library in a folder named Recordings." For 1:1 and group calls it lands in the OneDrive of whoever pressed Record.

The transcript. A separate object in a separate place: "Teams live transcripts for meetings with recording and/or transcription are stored in the meeting organizer's OneDrive for Business. The transcript can be accessed through the meeting chat and Recap tab in Teams until a meeting organizer deletes the transcript." When the call is over, "the transcript is immediately available in the meeting event on the calendar. By default, meeting organizers and co-organizers can download it as a .docx or .vtt file."

The AI recap. Also separate, and licensed separately: intelligent recap is listed by Microsoft under "Teams Premium and Microsoft Copilot", where "licensing and the transcription policy control this feature. Users with a Teams Premium or Microsoft Copilot license automatically have access to this feature."

And this is the sentence that explains the missing captions:

Closed captions aren't fully supported if the Teams meeting recording is moved or copied from its original location in OneDrive or SharePoint.

That is Microsoft's own admin documentation. The captions shown during playback are "available during playback if transcription was turned on at the time of recording" — they are bound to the recording where it was born, not carried inside the video file. Move the file, and you have moved one of the four objects.

Who can still open it

Microsoft publishes the after-the-meeting access matrix for transcripts. Condensed, and quoting the cells:

Microsoft adds: "People who call into a meeting can't view the transcript." For recordings the ownership rule is stated just as plainly — "the meeting organizer automatically owns the recording. By default, only meeting organizers and co-organizers can download or delete the recording," and "for now, guests and external attendees can view the recording only if it's explicitly shared with them."

What expires, and what was never captured

Expiry is an admin setting, not a property of the file: "your admin settings determine a recording's expiration," and the admin surface for it is documented as "manage when recordings and transcripts expire for your organization." An owner whose recording expires "will get an email when it expires. At that point, they'll have up to 90 days to recover it from the recycle bin."

Some of the meeting is never in the recording at all. Microsoft lists what meeting recordings won't capture: "more than four peoples' video streams at once," "whiteboards and annotations," "shared notes," "content shared by app," and "videos or animations embedded in PowerPoint Live presentations."

And on the reader's language, Microsoft is explicit twice over: live translated transcription "is available as part of Teams Premium," and "past translated transcripts aren't stored. Only the original transcript is stored." Changing the spoken language changes it for the room — "when you change the spoken language setting, the transcript and caption language will change for everyone."

The client question

The situation that starts most of these threads is not really about storage. Microsoft's client availability table lists Windows ✅, macOS ✅, Linux ❌ — "Teams is no longer supported on Linux" — and Web ✅, "supported in Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari." A team that is mostly on Linux is a team on the web client, and the artifacts above still live in one person's OneDrive.

Google Meet: a file per start, in the host's Drive

Google's transcripts documentation is equally concrete. "Meeting transcripts are saved in the meeting organizer's Google Drive in the Google Meet folder," in per-meeting sub-folders, and "you get a separate transcript file each time you start Transcripts" — stop and restart during a call and you have two files.

Distribution is by email plus a calendar attachment: after the meeting "an automated email with a link to the meeting transcript is sent to: the host, any co-hosts, the person who turned on Transcripts." The transcript "is also attached to the meeting's Google Calendar event. All invitees in the host's organization can open the attachment," except that "if there are more than 200 invitees in the host's organization, the transcript is only available to the host, co-hosts, and the person who turned on Transcripts in the meeting."

Two limits worth writing down before you rely on it. Scope: "only the spoken words in a meeting are included in the transcripts. To get a transcript of chat messages, record your video meeting." Language: "meeting transcripts are available in: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish" — eight. And access is device-shaped: "you can only use the Transcripts feature on a computer, laptop, or Android device." Transcripts are a premium feature, listed for Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Starter, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Teaching and Learning Upgrade, Education Plus and Workspace Individual.

What it looks like when the meeting is a place

InterMIND was built the other way round: the meeting is an event inside a space that outlives it, so the artifacts are not files to be filed. Everything below is how the product works today.

One page, one permanent link. After a transcribed meeting, the recap is a single page holding the summary, the full speaker-by-speaker transcript, and the recording when the session was recorded. The recap link is permanent and serves every session of the meeting: a channel that has met twelve times has twelve session cards on one page, each with its own Summary and Transcript tabs. There is nothing to move, because there is no file to move.

Access is identity, not file permissions. Recaps are members-only: opening the link requires signing in, and only meeting members — the host and the people who participated — get access. Forwarding the link to someone who wasn't there does not grant access. This is the same rule for the transcript and the recording, because they are views of one thing rather than three objects with three sharing dialogs. It also has an honest edge: someone who joined as an unauthenticated guest has no account for the recap to belong to, so post-meeting artifacts go to signed-in members.

The summary has a shape. It is not a paragraph. The recap carries an overview, key takeaways, topic sections, negotiated points each marked agreed / open / disputed with who stated them and when, action items with the owner attached, and open questions that were raised and never resolved — each anchored to the moment in the transcript it came from.

It can be corrected, and the correction is auditable. Meeting members can edit the AI summary directly on the recap page. Every edit creates a revision, and version history shows the AI original and each edit as a word-level diff with author and timestamp. The recap message in chat updates to match.

Every member reads it in their own language. When the meeting is finalized, the summary and the transcript are translated into every participant's language right then, so each person opens their own version instantly rather than waiting on a translation. That covers 23 languages for voice, chat and notes. The transcript is generated in the speakers' original languages, and the translated copy is stored rather than rendered once and thrown away.

It arrives where people already are. The recap link goes out by email; a recap message is posted to the channel chat; the meeting's calendar event carries the link. Hosts can also add confirmed BCC addresses — a CRM or tracker inbound mailbox, up to ten, on every plan.

You can take the whole thing with you. Settings → Backup & Restore exports all your chats as a ZIP: chat messages, transcription records, files, images and conference recordings. It is available on every plan, including the free Basic tier, and restore puts selected chats back with their metadata — pins, reactions, translations, file names and types. Deletion is symmetrical and explicit: the host can delete a session's summary, transcript, recording and their translations, permanently.

Any operating system. It is a web app; a Linux desktop is a browser like any other, and there are native mobile and desktop apps for people who want them.

Two honest limits. Channels keep the recap of every past session; ad-hoc meetings keep only the latest session's recap, mirroring how their chat history is purged after each call — if you want the archive, meet in a channel. And InterMIND has no live transcription feature: the persistent trace of what was said is the post-meeting transcript and recap, not a word-for-word live feed.

Side by side

Documented facts from each vendor's own help pages, checked September 2026. Where a page doesn't state something, the cell says so.

The middle and right columns are not oversights. They follow from treating meeting output as files: a file has one home, one owner and one ACL, and the summary that describes it is a fourth thing bought separately. The left column follows from treating meeting output as the contents of a room the team keeps.

If you're staying on your current stack

Four things worth doing this week, all from the documentation above:

1. Find out who owns the artifacts. On Teams that is the organizer's OneDrive, or the channel's SharePoint library for channel meetings; on Meet, the organizer's Drive. Ask what happens to those meetings when that person changes role or leaves.
2. Check the expiry policy before you need the file. Teams expiry is an admin setting; the recycle-bin window after expiry is 90 days. That is a question for your admin, not a setting on the video.
3. Leave the recording where it was created. Moving or copying it is exactly the step Microsoft documents as breaking caption support.
4. Download the transcript for anything you'll need later — .docx or .vtt on Teams, by default only if you're the organizer or a co-organizer. People from another tenant can't view it afterwards at all, so anything cross-company has to be shared deliberately.

If most of the meeting's readers can't open the record — wrong tenant, wrong license, wrong client, wrong language — the archive exists for one person.

Related: if your team reads recaps from an AI assistant rather than an app, see which meeting tools expose an MCP server, and what each one lets the assistant do.

FAQ

Where are Microsoft Teams meeting transcripts saved? In the meeting organizer's OneDrive for Business. Microsoft states that transcripts for meetings with recording and/or transcription "are stored in the meeting organizer's OneDrive for Business" and can be reached "through the meeting chat and Recap tab in Teams until a meeting organizer deletes the transcript." Recordings are stored separately — the organizer's OneDrive for regular meetings, the channel's SharePoint site in a Recordings folder for channel meetings (checked September 2026).

Why did the captions or transcript disappear after I moved the Teams recording? Because the caption track is tied to the recording's original location rather than travelling inside the video file. Microsoft's admin documentation states: "Closed captions aren't fully supported if the Teams meeting recording is moved or copied from its original location in OneDrive or SharePoint" (checked September 2026). The transcript itself is a separate object and stays where it was, reachable from the meeting chat and Recap tab.

Can someone from another company read a Teams meeting transcript after the meeting? No, per Microsoft's access matrix: a person from another tenant can view the real-time transcription during the meeting but not view or download the transcript afterwards, and anonymous participants can do neither. People who dial into a meeting can't view the transcript at all. Someone from the same organization can view it after the meeting but can't download it by default (checked September 2026).

Do Teams meeting recordings and transcripts expire? Expiration is controlled by your organization's admin settings — Microsoft documents an admin control to "manage when recordings and transcripts expire for your organization," and the expiry date on an individual recording can be changed, or removed, by someone with edit permission. If a recording does expire, its owner is emailed and has up to 90 days to recover it from the recycle bin (checked September 2026).

Where does Google Meet save the transcript, and who can open it? In the meeting organizer's Google Drive, in the Google Meet folder, with a separate file each time transcription is started. A link is emailed to the host, co-hosts and the person who turned Transcripts on, and the transcript is attached to the Google Calendar event, which all invitees in the host's organization can open — above 200 invitees in the host's organization it is limited to the host, co-hosts and the person who started it (checked September 2026).

Can I use Microsoft Teams on Linux? Not as a desktop app. Microsoft's client availability table lists Linux as unavailable with the note "Teams is no longer supported on Linux," and lists the web client as supported in Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Safari (checked September 2026). InterMIND is a web app, so a Linux desktop is a supported desktop.

Can my team read the summary and the transcript in their own languages? In InterMIND, yes — when a meeting is finalized the summary and the transcript are translated into every participant's language at that moment, so each member opens their own, covering 23 languages for voice, chat and notes. Microsoft states the opposite for Teams: live translated transcription is part of Teams Premium, and "past translated transcripts aren't stored. Only the original transcript is stored." Google documents Meet transcripts in eight languages, in the language spoken (checked September 2026).

How long does an InterMIND recap stay available? Until the host deletes it. A channel keeps the recap of every past session on the same permanent link; an ad-hoc meeting keeps only the latest session's recap, the same way its chat history is purged after each call. The host can delete a session's summary, transcript, recording and their translations, and that deletion is permanent.

Try it

• How to send meeting recaps to your CRM, help desk or spreadsheet — a recap copy by email, Zapier, a signed webhook, or the API.
• Open the live demo — a meeting in your language, no signup.
• Start your first meeting — guests join by link, each in their own language.
• See what a recap looks like — summary, transcript, and the structure above on a real example.
• Read the recap docs — access rules, editing, archive and BCC copies.
• Back up your chats — what the ZIP contains and how restore works.

If the language of the record is the part that bothers you rather than its filing, that argument is laid out separately in how much of your meeting still exists in your language a week later.

Sources: Microsoft Support — Start, stop, and find meeting recordings in Microsoft Teams and View live transcription in Microsoft Teams meetings; Microsoft Learn — Teams meeting recording and transcript storage and permissions in OneDrive and SharePoint, Overview - Recording and transcription for Teams meetings, events, and calls and Overview of the Microsoft Teams client; Google Meet Help — Use Transcripts with Google Meet, checked September 2026.