📼 Archiving Zoom Videos with Dropbox and Notion

We record a lot of video at egghead.io. As a fully distributed remote team we've got several channels of communication, but one of the most popular and useful channels for us is Zoom.

Being able to talk face to face has a lot of benefits and allows for nuance and expression as well as mutual understanding. In short, it lets us get work done!

One of the additional benefits of using video chat is that we are able to record every conversation that we want to keep a record of. In fact, many of us have "record to cloud" set as our Zoom default.

Left unchecked you can quickly end up receiving emails from Zoom that give a warning that your storage capacity is about to fill up. The fine folks at Zoom will allow you to increase your storage, but it starts to get very expensive, very quickly.

Name your Zoom meetings

"Joel's Zoom meeting" x5842

The default name is horrible. If you make a habit of scheduling and naming your meetings you will have a much easier time making sense of them later. I've made this mistake in the fast and having 100+ meetings with the exact same name is a horrible situation if you want to make future use of your recordings.

Zoom allows you to schedule meetings directly from their apps and this creates calendar events. This works very well.

We also use Calendly for a lot of scheduling and it has an excellent Zoom integration.

Finally the Zoom integration for Slack works very well and allows you to provide a contextual name for your meetings.

Name your meetings!

This is perhaps the most important step.

Archive the video outside of Zoom

Zoom storage is super convenient and also very expensive relative to other solutions. The UI is also clunky and cumbersome.

We archive our videos in our Dropbox Business accounts that has 20 terabytes of space and allows for easy sharing.

Make sure the selective sync is on. 😬

We set this as a team default because our Dropbox is rather large.

Once Zoom has processed a meeting we download the appropriate views, copy them into a well named and dated folder on Dropbox, and delete the video from Zoom.

This really sucks if you try and do this later. It's way easier to do the archiving immediately.

Summarize in Notion

Finally we have a table in Notion called Videos and we create an entry for each. We link the video, drop in transcripts, and provide a written summary of the conversation. The Notion entry is what we finally share with other attendees or coworkers that might find it useful.

This final step creates a nice package and with transcripts is is extremely searchable!

You could do more with the videos from here including editing, summarizing further, etc but naming your meetings, archiving the videos, and creating a searchable summary that links to the archive makes mass video storage a fundamental assett to your team and business.

If you'd like more specific details about how we archive videos at egghead, here's the process checklist.