Article

How to export Microsoft Teams chats

By TrustPast

Updated November 5, 2026

A company of 30 or more that runs on Microsoft 365 does a lot of its thinking in Teams. The dispatch channel, the project channel, the chat where two people worked out why a job went over. That history is a record of how the company does its work, and a buyer pays to license records like it to train AI models. This guide settles what a buyer wants from Teams, what to count first, where Microsoft keeps the messages, and how its export routes work once an agreement says what is in scope.

Version note. Checked on 5 November 2026 against Microsoft Learn’s pages for eDiscovery in the Microsoft Purview portal, the Teams Export APIs and Teams retention, linked where each is used. Menus and limits change. If a step here differs from Microsoft’s page, Microsoft’s page wins.

What a buyer wants from Teams, and what it doesn’t

micro1 is the buyer on this page. It says what it looks for in plain words: “data that reflects how work is actually performed within an organization.” It adds that “The most valuable datasets capture real operational expertise, decision-making processes, and repeatable workflows.” Among the records it names for eligible companies are “internal communications, SOPs, project histories, CRM records, support tickets”.

So the value in a Teams history is not who the customers were. It is not what they paid. It is the thread where a site lead posts a photo, an engineer asks two questions, and the team agrees what is wrong and what to do. It is the chat where an estimate was argued over, cut, approved, and turned into a job with a start date. It is the channel post a week later where someone writes down what they would do differently.

The names in those threads come out. micro1 says that before any participation the two sides confirm the data is “De-identified before sharing”, and that “Personal and identifying information is removed or transformed before your data is shared with third parties.” What stays is the shape of the work: the question, the diagnosis, the decision, the follow-up. Why buyers want that, and what they leave out, is on what data buyers actually want from a trade business.

Apply & License Your Data

Count first; you don’t export to apply

micro1’s process has four steps. “Discovery & pricing”, where it says “We identify licensable datasets across your business and tailor an offer based on the nature, scale, and value of your data.” “Contracting”. “Delivery & acceptance”, where “You securely transfer your data through our APIs or other approved methods. We review the data for completeness.” And “Payment”, where micro1 says it pays in full within 30 days of acceptance, “with payments typically ranging from $100K to over $3M” (indicative, not an offer).

Files come third, after a contract. Before that, micro1’s referral page says a company “sets up the company’s profile on the company portal” and “completes data manifest”. Qualified companies “are invited to connect with a Data Partnership Manager to discuss their data, licensing terms, and next steps.” A manifest is a description of what you hold. It is not a copy of it.

micro1 also says “There’s no fixed minimum number of files, documents, or terabytes.” It weighs “the historical depth, breadth, quality, and relevance of the available data”, and says “Companies with several years of records across multiple business systems are generally a stronger fit.” Teams is one of those systems. Mail and files are the others, and the Microsoft 365 guide covers how to count them.

Its estimator asks two questions about the record: “How many employees does your company have?” and “How many years of data do you have?” For Teams, our own short list:

how many years the tenant’s Teams history goes back;
how many teams and channels carry work, not the social ones;
how many people have posted, now and at peak;
whether a retention policy deletes old messages.

None of that needs an export. Worth two minutes to see your range? Our estimate asks five questions.

Where Teams keeps the messages

This is the part that surprises most owners. A Teams message is not stored in one place. Microsoft says “Teams data is stored in Azure Cosmos DB,” and that Exchange Online keeps the compliance records eDiscovery reads. “eDiscovery never operates against the real Teams message data.” For an export, what matters is where those compliance copies sit. Microsoft’s table, kept to its words:

Standard channels. “All channel messages and posts are stored in the Exchange Online mailbox associated with the team.” Files “are stored in the SharePoint site associated with the team.”
1:1 chats. Messages “are stored in the Exchange Online mailbox of all chat participants.” Files sit “in the OneDrive account of the person who shared the file.”
Group chats. The same: every participant’s mailbox, and the sharer’s OneDrive for files.
Private channels. Files sit “in a dedicated SharePoint site associated with the private channel.” For the messages, Microsoft’s table says they are stored “in the Exchange Online mailboxes of all members of the private channel”, while the same page says compliance copies now “go to the dedicated private channel mailbox.”
Shared channels. Messages go to “a system mailbox associated with the shared channel.” To search them, Microsoft says “you need to search the mailbox for the parent team.”
Meeting recordings. They are “stored in the OneDrive account for the user recording the Teams meeting.”
Loop components. Microsoft says the content “is saved in a .fluid file” in the sender’s OneDrive, so OneDrive has to be a source.

Microsoft’s retention page says Teams is moving private channel messages “Towards the end of 2025” from user mailboxes to group mailboxes, “in the same way as messages for standard channels and shared channels.” As our own advice, ask whoever runs the tenant where yours sit today.

What this means in practice: a scope that says “the projects team” covers its standard channels and the team’s site. It does not cover a private channel inside it, a chat between two of its members, or a file someone dropped into a chat. Each of those is a separate location. Write each into the scope by name, or write it out.

Where Microsoft shows how much you have

The Microsoft 365 admin center has two Teams usage reports. Microsoft’s path for both: go to the admin center, select Reports (or Show all, then Reports), select Usage, then under Reports select Microsoft Teams. The User activity tab and the Team usage tab are the two to open.

The User activity report counts, per person, “Channel messages”, described as “The number of unique messages that the user posted in a team chat during the specified time period,” and “Chat messages”, the messages “posted in a private chat.” It also has “Posts”, “Replies” and “Last activity date (UTC)”. The Team usage report shows, per team, active users, active guests and active channels. Both export: “To export the report data into an Excel .csv file, select Export.”

Two limits. Microsoft says these reports display “trends over the last 7, 30, 90, or 180 days.” So they show how busy Teams is now, not how many years it holds. And on names: “By default, all reports hide user information such as usernames, display names, groups, and sites.” For a count, leave them hidden. Microsoft lists who can view the reports, among them Exchange Administrator, SharePoint Administrator, Reports Reader and Teams Administrator.

The years are yours to find. Our own method:

Open the oldest work team. Scroll its main channel to the top and note the date of the first post.
Note when the company moved to Teams. If chat lived somewhere else first, that history is a separate record; our Slack guide covers one common case.
Ask the admin whether a Teams retention policy deletes messages, and after how long.
List the teams and channels that carry work. Leave out the social ones.

Three ways out of Teams, and which one fits

Microsoft publishes three routes. Only two of them reach a company’s record.

The personal export. Microsoft Support has a page for exporting chat history, media and call logs. You sign in to the Export page, choose “Chat history, Media, or both”, then “Submit request”. But the page says: “These sections apply to Microsoft Teams for personal use only.” It is not a route for work chats on a company account.

eDiscovery in Microsoft Purview. This is the route Microsoft documents for an organisation’s Teams content. A search covers mailboxes, sites and Teams together, and the export comes out as packages with an item report. The full export procedure, step by step, is in our Microsoft 365 guide; below are only the parts that change for Teams.

The Teams Export APIs. Microsoft says these “allow you to export 1:1, group chat, meeting chats, and channel messages from Microsoft Teams.” They are for a developer, not a menu: an app registered with the Microsoft identity platform, with application permissions that “Only an administrator can approve”. Microsoft names them: “Chat.Read.All”, “ChannelMessage.Read.All” and “User.Read.All”, plus two more for meeting transcripts and recordings. On licences, Microsoft says organisations “must have an active Microsoft Teams license assigned to the users whose data is being exported.”

As our own advice: eDiscovery suits a written scope, because it produces a report you can check line by line. The Export APIs suit a recurring feed. micro1 says data moves “through our APIs or other approved methods”; which route an agreement names is a question for the Data Partnership Manager.

Who can run an eDiscovery export

Microsoft is precise about the roles. “The primary eDiscovery-related role group in Microsoft Purview portal is called eDiscovery Manager.” An eDiscovery Manager “can search content locations in the organization and perform various search-related actions such as preview and export search results.” They “can only access and manage the cases they create.”

An eDiscovery Administrator can do the same and can “view and access all eDiscovery cases”. Microsoft warns that because these administrators “can access potentially sensitive information in the results of a compliance search, you should limit the number of people who are eDiscovery Administrators.”

The Export role is the one that starts an export. Microsoft says a user with the Compliance Search role but not the Export role “can download the results of a search for up to two weeks after the initial export action was created,” once someone with the Export role starts it. To hand out these permissions, “You need to be a member of the Organization Management role group or be assigned the Role Management role.”

Then the licence. Microsoft’s get-started page says: “Both admins and users working with eDiscovery cases require a Microsoft 365 Enterprise E3 or E5 license.” Our advice: one named person runs the export, in one case, for one agreement. Not three admins with access to everything.

The Teams choices in an eDiscovery export

Most of the export pane is the same for mail and Teams. Four choices are Teams-specific, all from Microsoft’s export page.

Shared channels. Under the tenant-wide settings, one option reads “‘All people and groups’ should include shared Teams channels.” Leave it off unless the scope names them. A shared channel holds another company’s words too.
HTML transcripts. “Organize conversation into HTML transcript: Contextual chat messages are threaded into HTML transcripts for ease of review and handling.” Without it, each message is a separate item.
Context around a hit. “Include Teams and Viva Engage conversations: Include messages posted within a 12-hour window before and after each responsive item.” The search decides what comes out, and this option adds the messages around each match.
Cloud attachments. Microsoft says “To collect cloud attachments from Shared Channels in Teams, the Shared Channel SharePoint site must be included in the search.”

Microsoft’s review-set page explains what the transcripts look like. For 1:1 and group chats, “you might have multiple transcript files, each one corresponding to a different time frame within the conversation.” For channels, “Each post and all replies and attachments are saved to its own transcript.” That suits a buyer looking for how a problem was worked out: one post, its replies, in order.

What the file holds

Microsoft says “Microsoft Teams data appears as IM or Conversations in the Excel eDiscovery export output.” In a PST, “all conversations are located in the Team Chat folder under Conversation History,” and “The title of the message contains the team name and channel name.” Private chats sit in the same folder in each user’s mailbox.

Microsoft lists what Teams content eDiscovery can find. Among it: chat messages in standard channels, 1:1 chats, group chats and chats with guests; edited messages; inline images; code snippets; tables; quotes; channel names; meeting chat, metadata, recordings and transcripts. Two details matter for an old history. Microsoft says reactions are supported “after June 1, 2022” and “Reactions before this date aren’t available for eDiscovery.” And recorded meeting files over 350 MB give a processing error.

On dates, Microsoft says eDiscovery “doesn’t modify or rewrite timestamps,” and the review-set page says “The date and time for all conversations in Teams are shown in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).” A message posted at five in the afternoon in Chicago shows in UTC, hours later.

Also not everything is there. Microsoft says plainly: “Not all Teams content is eDiscoverable.”

The limits that shape a big export

Microsoft’s limits page sets the size of what one export can carry. For standard eDiscovery, Microsoft lists:

500,000 items and 100,000 locations per export;
2 TB of data per search, and 2 TB an organisation can export in one day;
PST files of up to 10 GB, and packages of up to 40 GB;
an export rate of 2 GB per hour per mailbox.

Then the clock. “If an export runs for more than seven days without completing, it automatically cancels.” And “Search export packages expire 14 days after you create the export,” after which the data “can’t be recovered.” Microsoft’s advice for size is to “reduce the size of the export by using date ranges or other types of filters.” As our own advice: a scope written by team, channel and year is easy to split into batches.

What retention has already removed

A Teams admin can set a retention policy that deletes chats and channel messages after a set time. Microsoft says these policies can delete “Teams chats messages”, “channel messages, and private channel messages”. When the time runs out, messages are “permanently deleted from both the Exchange mailboxes” and the chat service behind Teams. If yours deletes after two years, the third year back is gone. Count only what is still there.

Microsoft adds a warning that matters for a count: “Messages visible in the Teams app are not an accurate reflection of whether they’re retained or permanently deleted for compliance requirements.” A message a user deleted “doesn’t go into the SubstrateHolds folder for 21 days”, and can still be found by eDiscovery until it is permanently deleted.

People who left are a second gap. Microsoft says that if a user leaves and their account is deleted, “their chat messages that are subject to retention are stored in an inactive mailbox” and remain “available to an eDiscovery search.” Without that, the Export APIs reach messages “for deleted users up to 30 days from the time the user was deleted,” and deleted teams and channels “for a maximum of 30 days.” Ask the admin before anyone removes an old account.

The personal data in a Teams history

Teams holds people. Customer names and site addresses pasted in for a crew. A phone number. A sick day. A pay question in a chat between two colleagues. Our own description, not Microsoft’s: the further a message is from a channel, the more personal it tends to be.

micro1 publishes how it handles this. “Personally identifiable information (PII) is removed when relevant, access is restricted to a limited number of authorized team members, and customer data is processed through isolated pipelines that prevent it from being commingled with other engagements.” It adds that “certain datasets may undergo synthetic rewrites that preserve workflow structure while reducing direct ties to original records.”

And it publishes the checks the company keeps: “companies have the opportunity to review representative samples before use, and deletion requests are honored according to the terms of the engagement.” On ownership: “Companies retain ownership of their underlying data.” How removal of names works in plain words is on how de-identification works, and staff records in particular on what about employee personal data.

What is never included

micro1 doesn’t publish one fixed list of what stays out of a Teams history. It says “We protect sensitive information through data anonymization and secure handling,” and the scope is set in the licensing terms at contracting.

Here is what we tell owners to keep out, as our own advice, not micro1’s:

1:1 chats that are not about the work. The chat is in two people’s mailboxes. Neither expected anyone else to read it.
HR, payroll and management channels. Pay, reviews, discipline and leave are not how the work was done.
Shared channels with another company. A supplier’s or client’s staff wrote half of it. Their contract decides, not yours.
Client-owned material. Drawings or documents a client supplied under contract stay theirs. Client-owned work and NDAs covers how to check.
Health and payment details. A card number or a medical note in a chat should never have been there. Flag it so it stays out.
Privileged threads. Anything with the company’s lawyers.
Meeting recordings, unless counsel says the people recorded can be included.

What this means for a company of thirty or more

Here is what a company of 30 to 150 usually keeps in Teams, as our own description and not a list from micro1.

A trade contractor with an office team keeps the job channels: the site photos, the question from the crew lead, the answer from the estimator, the change that followed. An engineering or services firm keeps the project teams: the scope question, the review comments, the sign-off. A logistics or field-service company keeps the dispatch and exceptions channels: what went wrong, who fixed it, and the note that changed the procedure. An office that quotes keeps the thread where a number was argued down and the job was won.

In each case, the messages that count are the ones that show a decision being made. The customer is removed. The price may be removed. What is left still shows how your people diagnose, decide and follow up. The chat archives page goes through which parts of a chat history show that, and the project history page covers the job record those threads hang off. Why 30 people is micro1’s published line is on the page for companies with 30 or more staff.

micro1 lists three payment tiers: “$100K-500K” for “Qualified Enterprise Data Partnerships”, “$500K-3M” for “Large-scale operational datasets or ongoing participation across multiple teams and business functions”, and “$3M+” for “Highly unique, proprietary operational data” (indicative, not an offer). Its estimator says: “Indicative estimate only. Final payout is determined based on data sources, volume, quality, access terms, and due diligence.” We can only show you the band.

If the company has closed

A closed company’s tenant often lapses with the last invoice. micro1’s referral page lists a “Defunct Company Data Partnership”, saying “We are acquiring data from companies that are no longer operating,” with “30+ employees” among its requirements. If the tenant is still there, count it before any account is deleted; the 30-day windows above are short. The page for closed companies covers the rest of the record.

Check the export

If an agreement asks for an export, check it before it goes anywhere. Five checks, as our own advice:

The locations. Compare the team mailboxes, user mailboxes and sites in the item report with the scope. Nothing extra, no shared channel by accident.
The dates. Sort by date. The oldest and newest items should match the agreed years, remembering that times are in UTC.
The counts. Compare the totals with what you counted, team by team.
The exclusions. Search the output for the HR channel, the payroll team and the lawyer’s name. If one turns up, the scope was wrong. Run it again.
The expiry. Download within 14 days and keep the packages access-controlled.

Where we fit

We, TrustPast, explain the process and give you a range with our estimate. It is ours, not an offer. You apply to micro1 yourself, through the button on this page, with counts, not files. micro1 pays us a referral fee. You pay us nothing. We never see your Teams, your exports or your files. How the records are protected is on how it’s safe, and what happens once you have applied is on what happens after you apply.

Before you apply

Four things to settle first, as our own advice:

Count. Years of Teams history, work teams and channels, people who posted. Write the numbers down.
Don’t export. In micro1’s published process, files move only after contracting.
Ask about retention. Find out what the tenant deletes, and stop anyone deleting old accounts.
List what stays out. Private chats, HR channels, shared channels, client material, recordings.

Then answer the five questions. If the range is worth your time, apply.

TrustPast

Questions and answers

Do we have to export our Teams chats to apply to micro1?

No. micro1’s published process starts with discovery and pricing, then contracting. Data moves at the third step, delivery and acceptance, where micro1 says “You securely transfer your data through our APIs or other approved methods.” Count first. Export only after an agreement says what is in scope.

Can a staff member export their own work chats from Teams?

Not with the personal export. Microsoft’s export page for chat history, media and call logs says its sections “apply to Microsoft Teams for personal use only.” Work chats and channel messages come out through the organisation’s tools: an eDiscovery export in Microsoft Purview, or the Teams Export APIs.

Who in the company can run an eDiscovery export of Teams?

Microsoft says members of the eDiscovery Manager role group can search content locations and export search results. The Export role is what starts an export. Microsoft also says the user needs a Microsoft 365 Enterprise E3 or E5 licence. Only someone in the Organization Management role group, or with the Role Management role, can assign those permissions.

Where are our Teams channel messages actually stored?

Microsoft says standard channel messages are stored in the Exchange Online mailbox associated with the team, and 1:1 and group chats in the mailbox of every chat participant. Files shared in a channel sit in the team’s SharePoint site; files shared in a chat sit in the OneDrive of the person who shared them.

Are messages from people who left the company still there?

Sometimes. Microsoft says that if a user leaves and their account is deleted, chat messages that are subject to retention are stored in an inactive mailbox, and are available to an eDiscovery search. Without a retention policy, Microsoft says the Export APIs reach a deleted user’s messages for up to 30 days.

Do we remove names before anything goes to micro1?

No. micro1 answers “Does my company need to anonymize its data before transferring it?” with “No, micro1 has processes for de-identifying and transforming sensitive information.” Your part is to name what stays out before the contract.

What does micro1 want from a Teams history?

micro1 says it wants “data that reflects how work is actually performed within an organization”, including “decision-making processes, and repeatable workflows.” As we read it, that is the thread where a problem was diagnosed and a call was made, not the customer’s name or what they paid.