Recording disaster

[PaulF1]

This is a last, desperate throw of the dice, but I wondered whether anybody would have any suggestions as to how to recover a meeting that I recorded earlier, which seems to have been lost.  

It was a local, manual recording and I had an external drive with ample space available plugged in to my laptop, so that I could select it as the storage location when you are given that choice just before conversion begins.   Unfortunately, the recording stopped automatically (close to the end anyway), due to "low disk space".  This can only have been referring to the laptop, as the external drive had plenty of capacity.  

A dialogue box told me to clear some space and then go to Meetings>>>Recorded to highlight the file for conversion later.    I both cleared space on the laptop and changed the local recording location under settings (I had accidentally left this as the laptop initially) - but when I went to the Recorded tab, the list was empty, apart from a constant buffering symbol.   After a few hours, the Recorded list eventually did populate with items, but they were all recordings prior to today's which was nowhere to be seen.

The Zoom chat support has been unable to help and I'm truly in desperate need of finding the recording, so just thought I would check in here, on the off chance.   A very long shot, I know.  Many thanks in advance.

[Ray_Harwood]

Hi, @PaulF1 - this is unfortunately a common request here in the Zoom Community.

 The easiest way is to open the Zoom Settings window, go to the Recording tab, and see where Zoom is set to store recorded files. Navigate to the indicated folder and see if the recording folders and files are there. 

If they are, and it’s on your laptop with not much space left, I recommend you COPY the files over to your External drive just to be sure nothing happens to them. 

Then, go to this Zoom Support page about recordings, down to the Troubleshooting section, especially the Troubleshooting local recording issues section. It’s possible it won’t be able to do the conversion due to the lack of space. If this happens, there are workarounds I’ve used before – come back here with the results of your efforts and I’ll see if I can help you a bit more. 

[PaulF1]

Hi Ray, many thanks for all your advice and for taking the trouble to respond.    The problem was that I had forgotten there was a setting for the destination of local recordings within the settings menu - it has been a while since I recorded a meeting and when I did a test run last night, I was prompted for my choice of file destintaion as I ended the meeting and so thought that as long as I had my external drive plugged in and ready, I'd be fine. Of course, the test recording only lasted a minute, whereas the recording proper lasted an hour and had obviously exceeded the laptop capacity, which must have been the default setting.    So I never got as far as ending the meeting before a conversion began and failed.

I changed the local recording setting to the external drive at that point, in the vain hope it might work, but it didn't.   I can't find the unconnverted file in any folder on my laptop.
 
And as (bad) luck would have it, having not recorded a meeting in ages, today I had to record two.  The second was successful, but I imagine that the conversion and saving process involved in that has ended any faint hope of me retieving the earlier one.   I just wanted to be certain before I have to confess to my boss and the various important people who featured in the recording.    Thanks again for your reply - much appreciated.

[PaulF1]

Zoom support, who have been very helpful, suggested  trying to locate the "double click to convert" temporary files.   Unfortunately, no such files have appeared anywhere - nothing with the releavnt Zoom extension can be found on my laptop from the time at which the recording stopped and the conversion failed.

However, I have found a file from the exact time at which the recording began.  I don't know what it contains as I don't have a suitable program to open it, but it is named "zoomus.enc" and the file path is C:\Users\paulf\AppData\Roaming\Zoom\data

I don't know if it is relevant, but I did have the recording setting "Keep temporatry recording files" selected, which is supposed to help locate files in the event of there being a need to troubleshoot.

I'm desperately hoping that the answer lies within that.