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Where should I store my video recordings?

  • Writer: James Stanbridge
    James Stanbridge
  • Jun 26, 2020
  • 3 min read

With so many of us using Zoom these days, I will share with you here advice for what and where to store all your video.


One of real benefits is being able to quickly, easily re-share our service or sessions with clients who either want to review the materials, missed the class for some reason or want the materials but were never going to be able to attend (time zone challenges etc).


Add this to the awareness that many of us have, that video on YouTube and Facebook, not to mention Instagram is crucial to our Marketing Strategy - what to do with all this material and how to store it is a question that comes up for most of my clients.


  1. Think about your video as 'data' - IT Pros are used to thinking about data in different categories, which helps us decide how to store it appropriately. To keep it simple, I recommend you think in terms of

    1. 'Active' or 'In Production' data - these are the videos or other content that is being accessed today, for your business. A good example would be a promotion you are running, a teaser for an event or service that is current on your online platforms, websites, Facebook, YouTube etc

    2. 'Archive' which means you can't throw it away, it could be needed, but you have no immediate use for it today. This could include a session or lesson which a client might want access to but no-one is asking for today. I often have snippets that I think I might use in a presentation or a show-reel that I have not created yet.

    3. 'Deep Storage' These are assets that you have no predicable use for, but that must be kept for regulatory reasons or just from a sense of personal record. Typical of these would be lessons with Children were safeguarding needs to be provable etc.

  2. ACTIVE or PRODUCTION: The cheapest storage for active data is often in 'The Cloud' - so cheap it is frequently free. Zoom offers a reasonably priced Cloud Storage of Zoom recordings. The free tier is only 1gb of storage, which is less than 2 hours of meetings for most people - but their first paid tier gives you 100gb a month - which is plenty for many use cases. Using Zoom's Cloud storage has many advantages, the biggest in my view is that you have really flexible options for what is stored - in your recordings settings you can choose to have the Gallery View, the Speaker View, Shared Screen AND a separate audio track all recorded. These can be edited together to make compelling video of the event for re release onto Facebook, YouTube etc. The next biggest advantage, and one people really love is that you can give a 'view only' link to a client to access the recording - without ever having to download the files yourself. BEST PRACTICE here would be to limit the access time, tell your client they have 30 days to view. Then expire the files.. maybe moving them to your 'Archive' or 'Deep Storage' model. Even if you are deciding to download from Zoom, or record directly to your computer, you need somewhere for your active video data. I am going to assume that you have followed my advice on Privacy and Privacy Policy and have the appropriate opt-in for recording. For publicly accessible video, the best place to store are YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and others. Their business model means they cover the costs of storage with advertising, meaning we get it for free. Don't pay for storage, when you can get it for free! It is also highly likely that they have a better process for backup and recovery, bandwidth and streaming than you or I could ever afford.

  3. ARCHIVE: My recommendation here is to use the 'unlisted' or 'private' categorisation on YouTube and Facebook respectively - this means that while the data continues to be available should you need it, it would not be part of the algorithmic discovery and serves the purpose of keeping your video available, but not really in an active or production state.

  4. DEEP STORAGE: Terabytes of storage are cheaply available as a USB drive. Move your deep storage files to these drives and store them physically somewhere you feel comfortable with, into a Fire Safe if necessary. There are many other solutions, which I am very happy to share with you, which include Amazon Web Services, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Google Cloud and others, who supply deep storage services at a reasonable cost. For most of us, a few Terra-bytes will be more than enough!

Of course - feel free to book a Power Hour and I'll be happy to work on your specific needs


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