As the university shifted to an online and hybrid environment in Spring 2020, Zoom became an important resource for students, faculty, and staff across our campus. With the sudden increase in usage, our Zoom Cloud storage for recorded Meetings and Webinars is quickly approaching its storage limit. To relieve Zoom storage, which should only be viewed as temporary, we are introducing a retention schedule for Zoom Cloud recordings.
Starting September 30, 2021, any Meeting or Webinar recordings saved to Zoom Cloud storage will be retained in the Zoom Cloud for 365 days, after which the recordings will be deleted from the Zoom Cloud. Any recordings already on the Zoom Cloud for 365 days or more when the schedule takes effect on September 30th will also be deleted. Once the recordings are deleted, you will have 24 hours to retrieve any recordings from your trash can and return the video to your Zoom cloud. Links to any deleted recordings will no longer be valid. Please read below for detailed information and how best to respond to this new schedule.
FERPA and Re-using Class Recordings
Please be aware of FERPA guidelines around preserving students’ right to privacy. For faculty members who wish to reuse a class video recording (e.g., a Zoom recording) in the same section of the same course in the same semester, there are no FERPA-related concerns. However, if a faculty member wishes to reuse a Zoom video recording in a different section of the course or in a different semester (e.g., reusing a fall semester video in a class this spring), students must be anonymized in the video recording unless they have granted written consent. If a faculty member wishes to post the video recording on a publicly accessible website, then again students in the recording must have granted written consent or be anonymized. For more information, please see FERPA and Re-using Class Recordings.
What does this means for my recordings?
- Existing Zoom meetings and webinars recorded before September 30, 2020, will be removed from Zoom Cloud storage, and their respective links will no longer work.
- New recordings of Zoom meetings and webinars after September 30, 2020, will be removed from Zoom Cloud storage after 365 days online.
What should I do?
- Review existing recordings and decide what should be moved to a long-term storage solution, either for your own personal use or for purposes of record retention in accordance with UT’s records management policies. More information can be found at UT Records and Information Management Services.
- Download your Zoom Cloud recordings that will require long-term storage.
- Note: Each video file size can range from around 300 - 800MB per hour.
- Video recordings edited in Zoom Cloud will be in their original, un-edited version when received. You may use Panopto or another editing tool to edit the videos in the future.
- Zoom Cloud Recording Bulk Download Service: If you are unable to download your own cloud storage recordings on your local device, please submit a request to Zoom@utexas.edu, and we can help transfer files to your preferred online storage.
- Review links to Zoom Cloud video content and update those links to the new long-term locations of the recordings.
- If you miss the September 30 deadline, you have 30 days to recover your deleted recordings from your Zoom web portal.
Where can I store my recordings long-term?
Although you may keep your recordings on the Zoom cloud for immediate viewing and sharing, UT has multiple options available to upload your content for semester-over-semester storage beyond the 365-day retention period.
- Your Local Hard Drive is an option if you are storing recordings for personal use. Review our Download page for more information.
- Panopto is our recommended video content management system for sharing videos with a robust set of video playback features. Panopto is available to all faculty and staff, and includes a Zoom integration that allows for recordings to be automatically moved to Panopto after recording and deleted from Zoom cloud storage. Additionally, your previous recordings from Zoom can also be uploaded to Panopto and benefit from Panopto’s rich features such as more advanced editing, auto-captioning, organizational tools, and Canvas integration. The current Panopto agreement includes unlimited storage but vendor agreements are subject to change so Panopto should not be viewed as a permanent storage solution. Panopto’s current retention period is 5 years. For help with Panopto, please contact Panopto@utlists.utexas.edu.
- Note: Panopto is NOT approved for HIPAA protected data. Please see the ISO approved cloud services for more information.
- OneDrive is an online storage solution in Microsoft 365 and allows 2TB personal storage and 25TB for Departments/Teams. Recordings stored and shared via OneDrive can be played back in your browser. Get started with OneDrive.
- UT Box is a cloud storage solution offered to students, faculty, and staff. Recordings may be stored and shared via UT Box, but the video playback features are limited by comparison. Currently, UT Box storage is unlimited, but the vendor will be setting storage limits in the future. The timing for this change to UT Box is not yet known. For long term content storage, please consider using alternatives until additional ITS guidance is available.
As always, please ensure that Confidential data is stored correctly on cloud collaboration services.
This change does not impact students.
Where can I get help?
If you have questions or concerns regarding the new schedule, please contact zoom@utexas.edu or visit zoom.its.utexas.edu.