Overview
Over the summer of 2025, USC updated the retention settings for USC Zoom cloud recordings. This change has two parts:
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Longer retention period for active accounts: Zoom recordings are now saved on your account for 16 months instead of 12 months. Once 487 days have passed since a recording's creation date, it will be automatically sent to your Trash.
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Auto-deletion automatically turned on: If you previously turned off auto-deletion for your USC Zoom account, it may have been turned on again. This means that recordings older than 16 months may have been automatically sent to your Trash, where they are permanently deleted after 30 days (August 22, 2025).
We highly recommend that you review your Zoom account recordings ASAP to download needed recordings at risk of deletion as well as retrieve needed recordings from Trash before permanent deletion.
Full announcement from ITS
You can view the full announcement about this change at Zoom Recordings – Data Retention Update.
Viewing your recordings
To view your list of Zoom cloud recordings, sign into https://usc.zoom.us and select Recordings & Transcripts in the left menu:
Any recordings that you created less than 487 days ago (or 16 months) will appear in this list. Recordings older than 16 months may appear if you previously used the option to disable auto-delete on an individual recording or if you recovered the recording from Trash earlier the same day.
Recovering deleted recordings
To look for older recordings, select the Trash tab. Then, click Recover beside the recording you need:
Recordings are automatically sent to the Trash tab after 16 months. This is also where older recordings were automatically sent if you previously had auto-delete disabled for your account.
If you recovered a recording that is older than 16 months from your Trash, it will be available in the Cloud recordings tab. We recommend immediately downloading the files before the recording is automatically deleted again.
Permanent deletion
Recordings are permanently deleted from Trash after 30 days.
Saving recordings indefinitely
Option 1 (recommended): Download the recording
The safest method for ensuring that you can access your older recordings is to download the files to your computer.
To download a recording, click the More options icon beside it and then select Download. If the recording is in your Trash, you must first recover it, as you cannot download files within the Trash tab.
Option 2: Disable auto-delete for an individual recording
If you need the recording to remain available on Zoom so that you can continue to share the link, it is possible to disable auto-delete on a recording-by-recording basis. Click the More options icon beside a recording and then select Disable auto-delete.
If you do not see the option to disable autodelete, contact ITS by emailing consult@usc.edu or opening a support ticket at https://itsusc.service-now.com/.