Saving chats

By IT Champions | October 14, 2020

Zoom allows the host, co-host or participants of a meeting to save all the chats that occurred within the duration of the meeting.  If you have a lively and possibly quite technical discussion, many points of detail, including references and URLs, may be recorded – and if not saved will be lost at the ending of the meeting.  If saved, the ‘saver’ can subsequently review the in-meeting chats to follow up on references and incorporate into a meeting report. 

  1. To save chats manually in the Zoom meeting.
  • (i)   While in the meeting, click on the ‘Chat’ button on the toolbar at the foot of the screen. This will enable the chat panel to appear on the right.  The upper portion of the will display any chats as they are created, but for this point, we are interested in the options in the small sub-panel at the bottom of the Chat panel.  There is a set of three dots […] on the right hand side of this – click the dots, and a small menu will be revealed:

          Chat controls – in meeting options

  • (ii)  The top option is labelled ‘Save chat’ – but this is only enabled (black) when one or more chat comments have been added.  The chat is saved locally on the device: by default, to the ‘saver’s’ Documents folder.  To review the saved chat, go to Documents | Zoom and locate the folder with the date and time corresponding to the meeting.

      2. Using the Autosave option

Users can also set their Zoom account to autosave all chats within a meeting.  This way they do not have to manually save chats at the end of each meeting.

  • (i)  Sign in to Zoom.us and select ‘Settings’ from the left panel.
  • (ii) Under the ‘Meetings’ tab, select ‘In Meeting (Basic)’, and scroll down to ‘Auto saving chats’.  Toggle ON to have Zoom save your chats for each meeting.

     3. How to save on Cloud   (but see Note below)

If you have a paid account (Pro or higher) and have Cloud Recording enabled, then you can set options to save chats on the Zoom cloud.  This way you can access the chats no matter where you log in from.  To save in-meeting chats to the Zoom cloud:

  • (i)  Sign in to Zoom.us and select ‘Settings’ from the left panel. 
  • (ii) Next to recording, (on the right side of the screen) click ‘Edit’.  Select ‘Save chat text from the meeting’ and hit ‘Save changes’

To access chats saved on the cloud, log in to the web client, and select ‘Recordings’ from the left panel.  You can either download the meetings or share them.

NOTE.  The standard Zoom Cloud storage allowance is 1 Gb, and so will not be able to hold a large quantity of meeting minutes – a 90 minute meeting will occupy approx. 25Gb