How to Save a Zoom Chat After the Meeting Ends

The meeting closed and the chat panel went with it. Whether the messages can be recovered depends on what was saved or recorded during the meeting, so the steps run from the sure route to the last resort.

Save the chat while the meeting is open

Open the Chat panel, click the three-dot menu at the bottom of the panel, and choose Save chat. Zoom writes a text file into Documents, Zoom, inside a folder named with the date and meeting name, and shows a link to open it. Do this before the host ends the meeting; once the window closes, the button is gone.

Turn on automatic saving for future meetings

Sign in at zoom.us, open Settings, click In Meeting (Basic), and turn on Auto saving chats. From then on every meeting you host saves its chat to the same Documents folder when it ends. Participants need the setting on their own account to get their own copy.

Look in the local recording folder

If you recorded the meeting to this computer, open the recording folder (Documents, Zoom, the meeting folder) and look for a chat text file next to the video and audio files. Zoom includes it when the chat was saved as part of the recording.

Check the cloud recording

On paid plans with cloud recording, sign in at zoom.us, open Recordings, and click the meeting. If the cloud recording setting Save chat messages from the meeting / webinar was on, a chat file is listed with the recording and can be downloaded. This is the only place a chat survives after the meeting when nobody saved it locally.

Ask another participant

If nothing was saved or recorded on your side, the chat is not stored anywhere on Zoom's servers for a meeting without cloud recording. The host or another participant may have saved it or had auto-save on; ask for their file.

What a saved chat contains. Each participant's file holds only what that person could see. Messages sent before someone joined are not included unless the host enabled chat history for late joiners, and direct messages between two other people are never in your file.

Team Chat is different. Persistent channels and direct messages in Zoom's Team Chat are stored in your account and stay after any meeting. Only the in-meeting chat disappears when the meeting ends.