Finding and exporting your Microsoft Teams data

What it holds

Teams contains channel posts, private and group chats, meeting discussions and references to shared files. The conversation records sit separately from documents and recordings, which are usually kept in SharePoint or OneDrive.

Where Microsoft Teams shows the size

1. Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center with a reporting role, such as Reports Reader or Teams Administrator.
2. Go to Reports, then Usage (choose Show all if Reports is hidden).
3. Pick Microsoft Teams, open User activity and set the period to 180 days.
4. Export the CSV and add up Team Chat Message Count and Private Chat Message Count.
5. The Teams admin center has the same report under Analytics & reports, Usage reports.

Plan and admin role. Global, Exchange, SharePoint, Teams or Teams Communications Administrator, or Reports Reader. Names are hidden by default; that setting doesn't change the totals.

Exporting the full history

1. Make sure the exporting account has eDiscovery permissions and an E3 or E5 licence.
2. In the Microsoft Purview portal, open eDiscovery, then Cases, and create a case.
3. Add a search over all people and groups, limited to Teams content and the full date range, and run it.
4. Choose Export, include shared channels and departed users, select HTML transcripts for conversations and PST for messages.
5. Follow progress in Process manager and download the packages within 14 days.

Copies of chats are stored in hidden folders of each participant's Exchange mailbox; channel posts go to the team's group mailbox. Files shared in chat live in OneDrive, channel files in SharePoint.

Packages can be sized from 1 to 10 GB (PST) and 2 to 40 GB (ZIP). Jobs running past seven days are cancelled, so split large tenants by date.

The Graph export APIs return chats and channel messages as JSON, but need admin-approved permissions and a Teams licence for each exported user.

Deleted messages remain exportable for 21 days, and content from deleted teams or users for 30 days, unless a hold keeps them longer.

You don't need to run an export to talk to us, and there's no need to clean it first — removing personal data is part of our work.