Chat History

[Michelle62]

I am in the process of upgrading laptops. One of the things that I am trying to understand and figure out is if chat history can be retrieved locally or do you need to have the cloud option enabled? If you have to enable the cloud option to get chat history will you be able to see your entire chat history since the account was enabled or does it start when you turn the chat option on?

Also is there a local zoom data folder that contains the chat history that I could copy ? And if so where is the location of the folder?

[Ray_Harwood]

Hey, @Michelle62,

The local chat files should be stored in the same place as any meeting recordings. Open your Zoom Settings window, click the Recording tab, and there’s a section on the right with the location, and a button that opens up that location.

 The Zoom Cloud won’t help you here and isn’t necessary. But if you have any other Cloud storage, I recommend creating a folder there and copying the meeting subfolders to your Cloud storage, then access them from your new laptop once your Cloud storage is connected.

 Otherwise, copy those subfolders to a flash drive or SDHD card from your old laptop. 

[Ray_Harwood]

Hey, @Michelle62... I was re-reading this thread, and I might have misconstrued your question to related to in-meeting chats, and you're probably actually talking about Zoom chats.  And hopefully you've already discovered that once you set up a Zoom client on a new machine, the chats should auto-populate from historical info in your account.

Sorry for any confusion!  Hope your new laptop is working out... I know new machines can be frustrating the first few days until everything is set up the way you like it.

[Michelle62]

Thank you for reaching back out.  How do we have access to the historical information on the account?  Is that related to the cloud backup being on?

[Ray_Harwood]

Hey, Michelle,

See this article:

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/210615143-Viewing-stored-chat-messages-in-Chat-History

[Quick Note: In Step 2 of "How to enable...", it should read Zoom Chat, not Zoom App.

I had done this before... since when I log into a different machine (I have several test machines and test accounts), I do see historical Chat data.  Here's my current settings:

[Michelle62]

This is good information.  So once you turn on the cloud option will you be able to pull all of your chat messages that you had since you started with that user account or does it start archiving the messages from the time you turn on the cloud option?

[Ray_Harwood]

The documentation isn't clear... and I'm afraid to cycle mine to OFF because I don't want to lose anything. 😟

Turning it on shouldn't hurt.  But I doubt that turning it on would be able to grab any historical data from before being On... it'll probably just start archiving new messages, but again, the documentation doesn't really say.  We could be pleasantly surprised?

[Pweeks]

Hi, 

I have the setting correctly set up to record the CHAT in my meeting. However when I search for the meeting from yesterday, it's not there? The meeting from last Thursday is there with the chat I had (so I know it works / is set up correctly) but eh meeting from 11:00 yesterday is not showing at all?