Zoom recordings problem and location can't be changed

[sherpa003]

I have trouble with Zoom that sometimes I cannot start recording. When I click the recordings button, the recordings preference dialog is displayed. There I cannot do anything to fix it. It happens intermittently. Some days it work and some it does not for a while

I the preference dialog, I cannot change the location of recordings. It is set to "~/snap/zoom-client/118/Documents/Zoom". When I click Open, nothing happens (in log it says "Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module", but I have this installed). When I click Change, it opens a dialog but I cannot select a folder and selecting a file has no effect. Also clicking this button adds "Model size of -11 is less than 0" to the log sometimes.

More info:

snap version snap 2.48 snapd 2.48 series 16 ubuntu 20.04 kernel 5.4.0-56-generic

zoom-terminal.log zoom_stdout_stderr.log

[ogra1]

i dont have noted any issues with recording over here yet, if that happens again, can you check with snap changes if something perhaps got updated underneath you during the meeting ? also note that the recordings button usually only shows already recorded meetings ... you can also always just navigate to the ~/snap/zoom-client/current/Documents/Zoom folder with a file manager in case you have problems opening recorded meetings in zoom itself.

i can actually reproduce the file location issue, it is a bit ominous tough that the file location input field is not editable at all in the dialog (not much i can do about that, seems to be an app bug), the open/change buttons seem to invoke the wrong xdg-portal dialog outside of the snap, this will require some time to research ...

[dholbach]

Confirmed. I'm seeing the same issue.

[dsoasti]

I'm having the same issue, I can't record any session on Zoom. After click on the record button, I get the preference dialog and can't open or change the target file where records should be saved. Any ideas how to fix it?

[rubencabrera]

I'm having the same issue too. Is there a workaround?

[Fuseteam]

guys if there is an solution this issue wouldn't be open, it is better to subscribe to the issue so you can be notified when it fixed than to adding "me too" comments. me too comments often distracts the maintainer rather than help what would help would be to do what the maintainer asked here and post the result

[dsoasti]

I managed to fix it like this: Updated the system usign "actualizaciones de sistema", it took a while to update, then uninstalled zoom, updated again and re-installed Zoom. Then had to copy the file sources.list from other linux pc and placed on my laptop It worked for me. Hope it works for others as well.

[jeissonh]

I had this issue. I uninstalled the Zoom client and the problem got dramatically bigger: Snap removed my local recordings with no confirmation. As a professor, I lost several recorded lessons, and I lost all my confidence in Snap.

[castrojo]

@jeissonh I thought my recordings were lost as well, they were just buried in a versioned directory ~/snap/zoom-client/143/blah instead of a common place so I had no idea they were in there. Might be worth taking a look!

[cwatts-dorking]

I've had exactly this problem twice. What worked both times was a) uninstall zoom-client b) restart computer c) install zoom-client. Now I come to look at it I have lost my recordings. The only one I now have is the one I used to check that it was working. The trouble is that you haven't got time to do that once the meeting has started which you wanted to record. If the recordings need to be kept, one could move them to a different folder as soon as they're done

[jeissonh]

Thanks for your responses!

In another forum, I learned that recent versions of snap store a backup when one removes an application. The command snap saved list them, and they can be restored with snap restore <backup_id>.

I did not retry to fix the storing location problem. I just downloaded the Zoom installer from the official website, and it worked as expected.

[Fuseteam]

I can confirm that Snaps in general indeed saves files in ~/snap/<app-name>/<version>

[mbdevpl]

I was having an issue which might be related to this (see #92).

TLDR:

When you try to save the meeting chat, snap tries to save it in the same old folder even after after the snap is updated, and fails because it cannot write to old folder (in my case the snap recordings config said .../snap/zoom-client/148/... while the snap was at version 160.

I fixed things by opening the recordings folder "Change" dialog and selecting some random file (for some ungodly reason that dialog is a file picker, not a folder picker) and then Zoom auto-magically fixed the path to .../snap/zoom-client/160/... and now I can save the chat again.

Maybe this will help with saving recordings as well?

I assume reinstalling the snap fixes the issue because it also resets the configuration :thinking: But I totally agree with jeissonh that reinstalling a snap without backing up everything first is a very bad idea -- I once lost all saved games for a game that was installed via snap, lost all faith in the platform since. Maybe didn't impact my work but still was painful.

[CodePint]

+1 on the saved recordings directory being incorrect.

You can change it in the zoom client setting by navigating to: Settings > Recording > Store my recording at

edit 1: You should be able to change it but for some reason the directory selector does not work in ubuntu and you cannot manually input a path, there is probably a config setting somewhere to change this outside of the GUI...I will look into this further.

edit 2: just going to use a fragile solution of a symlink for now (will break on version change): ln -s $ZOOM_SNAP_RECORDING_DIR ~/Documents/Zoom