Zoom Cleanup: Local Recordings and the Raw .zoom Doubles

What Zoom keeps on your disk

Local recordings land in Documents\Zoom by default — one folder per meeting, named by date, topic and meeting ID. After each conversion the final MP4 sits next to the raw .zoom file it was made from, and both stay until you intervene. The rest of the footprint lives in %APPDATA%\Zoom: logs, dumps and caches that grow on a schedule of their own.

• Local recordings — Documents\Zoom (or OneDrive\Documents\Zoom), one folder per meeting with audio, video and chat files
• Raw .zoom files — the pre-conversion originals, kept next to the MP4 after conversion; delete once the MP4 plays fine
• Logs — %APPDATA%\Zoom\logs, a text log per launch plus crash dumps
• Data caches — %APPDATA%\Zoom\data, virtual backgrounds, apps and web content the client caches
• The program itself — %APPDATA%\Zoom\bin holds only the running version, so there is nothing to win there

Recording housekeeping that pays for itself

Make it a habit to check Documents\Zoom after every recording session: keepers move to an archive location, the rest goes. Before deleting raw .zoom files, open the converted MP4 and watch a minute of it — conversion failures are rare, but they are silent if nobody checks. The logs folder can go wholesale; Zoom writes a fresh log on every launch and never reads the old ones back.

One setting deserves a look: if Documents lives inside OneDrive, every local recording syncs to the cloud and burns quota twice — on local disk and on cloud storage. In the Zoom client, Settings → Recording lets you point recordings at a dedicated folder outside the synced scope. Your future self, looking for a meeting from eight months ago, will also thank you for readable folder names.

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