How to Retrieve Zoom Chat History After Meeting

You could retrieve your Zoom chat after a meeting if you (the host) enabled either the Cloud Recording feature or the ‘Allow users to save chats from the meeting’ feature before the meeting. You can save the meeting chat to your computer locally or on the Zoom Cloud.

Hi, I’m Devansh. I often use Zoom to chat with other writers and editors and need to refer to the meeting chat. In this article, I’ll walk you through the steps to retrieve Zoom chat after a meeting and save it locally or on the cloud. I’ll also answer some common questions.

If your Zoom meeting just ended, but now you need to refer to the chat, keep reading!

Steps to Retrieve Zoom Chat History After Meeting

As I said, you can save your Zoom chat history locally or on the cloud. Let’s talk about both of them.

Local

You can allow members to save the chat if you’re the meeting host. To do this, open the desktop client and go to Preferences. In the General tab, click on View More Settings. A new tab will open in your browser. Scroll down to In Meeting (Basic) and check the box that says ‘Allow users to save chats from the meeting.’ Plus, ensure it’s set to Everyone.

Scroll down a bit more and find the ‘Auto saving chats’ option. As the description goes, ‘Automatically save all in-meeting chats so that hosts do not need to manually save the text of the chat after the meeting starts.’

If the meeting is over and this feature wasn’t enabled, the chats aren’t saved automatically (for the host). Next time you’re in a meeting and want to save the chat manually, click on Chat in the meeting controls, scroll down to the bottom of the window, click the ellipses (three dots), and then Save Chat. This will save the existing chat as a text file locally to your computer.

How to access that text file? On a Windows PC, open My Computer. On a Mac, open Finder. Now, you can open the Documents folder and click on Zoom. You’ll find folders of all your meetings labeled by date and time.

Cloud

With Zoom, you can also record your meetings on the cloud if you are a Pro member. You can enable cloud recording in the Zoom web portal. Just click on Settings in the navigation menu and click on Recording. Here, you can manage settings related to recording. Plus, you can also click on Record and Record to Cloud whenever a new meeting starts.

To access your chats on the Zoom web portal, click Recordings in the navigation menu and the Cloud Recordings tab. On this page, you can access the recordings of the meeting.

FAQs

Here are some more questions about saving Zoom chat history after the meeting.

How to Change the Save Location of Zoom Chat File Locally?

I noted the default save location of the Zoom chat text file before, but you can also change it if you want to. After opening the Zoom client, click on your profile picture and Settings. Here, click Recording. Click on the existing file location and click on Choose a new location. Now, you can select your preferred new file location!

How to Retrieve Old Chats in the Zoom web portal?

If you want to search for old chats (up to one year old) based on time period or for a specific user, click on Account Management in the navigation menu in the Zoom web portal. Click on Reports, User Activity Reports tab, and Chat History. Here, you can search for chats based on time period and user! You can also download those chats as a CSV file. This only works with a Pro plan.

Conclusion

Zoom makes accessing your chat relatively easy locally and on the cloud. You just need to ensure that the ‘Allow users to save chats from meeting’ feature is enabled. If you’d like to record your meetings on the cloud, I recommend you get a Pro plan.

Did you retrieve your Zoom meeting chat successfully? Please share with me in the comments!