All Zoom meetings are hosted on either Zoom Public Cloud (for "Licensed" user type) or the on-premise* Zoom Meeting Connector servers (for "On-prem" user type). The choice is made by your Zoom Administrator. This article is specific to users ("Licensed" user type) hosted on the Zoom Public Cloud environment.
Zoom Education subscription includes 0.5Gb (500Mb) of Zoom recording cloud storage per user (see Zoom cloud recording storage capacity). Zoom levy ‘overage’ charges for accounts that exceed this at an aggregate level, or organisations that also exceed any additional storage pre-purchased. Individual users may go over their allocation, but only if some other users correspondingly offset this by using less. The Zoom overage charges can add up quickly and it is strongly recommended that organisations using Zoom public cloud storage for recordings actively monitor their usage.
AARNet pass on to customers any charges levied by Zoom for ‘overage’ on your account.
The best practices and tools to help organisations monitor and control their Zoom storage are
- Settings
- Do not retain recordings any longer than necessary. Learnings from the higher education sector show that the vast majority of recordings are never accessed more than two weeks after they are first shared, and certainly not beyond the close of any related teaching assessments. Content that is needed long term for archival, or public record, is best downloaded and then hosted on platforms other than Zoom cloud storage.
- Auto delete cloud recordings after XX days. Review you typical usage for two weeks, then calculate how quickly if left alone this might exceed your storage. Set and lock at the all accounts level, an auto delete recordings after a specific number of days. Individual recordings can still be marked to not auto-delete by both users and Zoom admins as required. Recordings can also be easily recovered for up to 30 days post deletion.
- Do not record active speaker, gallery view and shared screen separately. Controlling options for video formats recorded to the cloud can be set at an Account, Group or individual user level.
- Require password or authentication to view cloud recordings. Whilst this won’t impact your storage volume, it will improve the privacy of participants in recordings.
- Monitor
- As Zoom Administrators, use the Cloud Recording Report to identify exactly which users are using large quantities of storage (this report can also be exported in to a CSV file).
- Make users aware of the limits and to review their Cloud Recordings as part of ‘My Profile’
- If you do need more than the default storage, purchase annually in advance. The rate charged by Zoom for pre-purchased storage is roughly half what is charged when ‘overage’ occurs. Costs also decrease quickly for storage purchased in advance. Continue however to monitor any additionally purchased storage so that you don’t exceed that as well.
Zoom administrators can learn more about Zoom Cloud Recording here: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/203741855-Cloud-recording
* Users hosted via ‘On Prem’ accounts on AARNet infrastructure utilise Cloudstor for recording storage. This has different limits, retention, and secure access controls. There is no charge for Zoom Cloudstor usage.