Teams meeting recordings are eating your SharePoint quota (and here is the fix)

A Teams meeting recording is stored as an .mp4. The file is roughly 400 MB per hour at 720p (Microsoft's current default), and it lands in one of two places depending on who called the meeting. Multiply by the number of meetings your organisation records in a year and the answer is almost always more than the total size of every Office document your users have created since your tenant was born.

Where the files actually live

• One-to-one and unstructured meetings: recording lands in the organiser's OneDrive under "Recordings/". Counts against their OneDrive quota.
• Channel meetings: recording lands in the SharePoint site backing that Team, under the channel folder. Counts against the tenant's pooled SharePoint quota.

That split matters because pooled SharePoint quota is where the storage overage bill actually shows up. Channel-meeting recordings therefore hit the same meter as your documents; the meeting your marketing team recorded on Tuesday costs the same $0.20/GB/month as the corporate policy PDF.

Why every tenant has a recording problem

A few structural reasons this compounds silently:

1. The default retention is "forever". Unless you or an admin has set a retention label, recordings sit indefinitely.
2. The "Record" button is one click. Nobody weighs 400 MB against the value of the recording before pressing it.
3. People rarely watch recordings back. Analytics from tenants we work with consistently show under 10% of recordings are viewed more than once.
4. Transcripts are stored separately (as .vtt) — small, no problem — but the perception that "the transcript is enough" doesn't translate to deleting the .mp4.

The three settings that fix 80% of it

1. Teams meeting recording expiration: Teams admin center → Meetings → Meeting policies → [your policy] → set "Meeting recording expires after" to 60 days (or 30 if you're aggressive). This applies to NEW recordings only; existing ones need a Purview retention policy to clean up.
2. Purview retention policy for OneDrive/SharePoint "Meeting recordings" folder scope: deletes recordings older than N days across every user. This is the retroactive equivalent of the setting above.
3. Meeting-quality cap: Teams admin center → Meetings → Video content → cap recording resolution at 720p. Turning off 1080p halves the file size for the same content. Most viewers do not tell the difference.

How TSO finds them

On the Largest Files tab, filter by extension .mp4 and workload SharePoint (channel recordings) or OneDrive (personal recordings). Sort by size, group by owner. The reclaim column will tell you what a 60-day retention would recover if you turned it on today. Most tenants find between 3-10 TB of recordings that nobody has opened since the meeting ended.