Does a Zoom recording record your whole screen or just the meeting?

Just the meeting. Zoom records the video, audio and shared content that reached the meeting, not a separate capture of your desktop. Your whole screen only appears in the file if somebody chose to share a whole display, and then it appears because that display was already being sent to every participant live. Nothing on your machine outside the share is recorded.

If a window is missing from my live screen share, will it show up in the recording?

No. The recording is built from the same capture stream the participants watch, not from a second look at your machine. Your computer captures the share once, encodes it once and sends it once. A window cropped out of a single-window share, or excluded from capture by the operating system, never enters that stream, so there is nothing for the recorder to write down.

What is the difference between a Zoom local recording and a Zoom cloud recording?

A local recording is written by the Zoom app on the recorder's own computer and follows that person's view, so their choice of active speaker or gallery layout is baked into the file. A cloud recording is composed on Zoom's servers using the layouts configured in the account settings, which is why one cloud session can produce several files with different layouts.

Do Microsoft Teams and Google Meet recordings capture my desktop?

No. Both record the composed meeting stream rather than any participant's screen. Teams renders the recording in the cloud and files it in OneDrive or SharePoint. Google Meet records the active speaker plus whatever is being presented and saves it to Drive. Neither client takes a desktop capture of its own, so windows you never shared are not in either file.

Can another participant's recording show more of my screen than mine does?

No. Every participant, and every recorder, receives the same encoded stream you sent. Someone recording locally, or pointing OBS at their own meeting window, is capturing what arrived on their machine. They cannot request extra pixels from your computer, so their file can only contain what you already put on the call, framed in their own layout.

When does a meeting recording actually contain my whole screen?

When you pick an entire display in the share picker. That mode sends the whole display live, notification banners, taskbar badges and anything you open included, so the recording preserves all of it. Sharing a single window, or a browser tab in Google Meet, sends only that surface. If your two monitors are set to Duplicate rather than Extend, both show the same shared desktop.

Does a Zoom, Teams or Meet Recording Capture My Whole Screen?

Only the meeting. None of these apps takes a picture of your desktop. A Zoom local recording is written by the Zoom client on the recorder's own machine and follows what that person is looking at. A Zoom cloud recording is composed on Zoom's servers according to the layout the account is configured for. Teams and Meet recordings are the composed meeting stream, rendered in the cloud and filed in OneDrive or Drive. Your whole screen ends up in a recording in exactly one situation: somebody chose to share a whole display, and it was already going out live to everyone in the call.

Four recorders, and where each one gets its pixels

The useful question is never "does it record" but "what is it pointed at". Every cell describes the source of the frames, not what your own monitor shows.

Behaviour	Zoom, local	Zoom, cloud	Microsoft Teams	Google Meet
Where the file is built	On the recorder's computer, by the Zoom app, in real time.	On Zoom's servers, from the streams Zoom received.	In the Microsoft cloud, from the composed meeting.	In Google's cloud, from the composed meeting.
Whose framing wins	The recorder's. Their active speaker or gallery choice is baked in permanently.	The account settings'. Layout is chosen before the meeting, not during it.	The service's standard composition of speakers and shared content.	Active speaker, plus whatever is being presented.
Nobody is sharing	Webcam tiles and audio, arranged by that recorder's layout.
Someone shares one window	That window, cropped to its edges, exactly as participants saw it.	The same crop, in the configured layout.	The same crop.	The same crop.
Someone shares a whole display	That entire display, notification banners and taskbar included, in all four. The recording is not adding anything, it is preserving what the room already watched.
Your unshared windows	Absent.	Absent.	Absent.	Absent.
Where the file lands	The recorder's own disk, by default a dated folder under Documents\Zoom on Windows.	Zoom cloud storage, retrieved as a link.	OneDrive or SharePoint, tied to the meeting.	The organiser's Drive, in a Meet Recordings folder.

Why a window missing from the live share is missing from the file too

This one idea settles a whole family of questions. Screen sharing is not a live window into your machine that the far end can pan around. It is a one-way pipeline, and it runs in this order:

You pick a source in the share picker: a display, a window, or in Google Meet a browser tab.
Windows composites the frames for that source. Anything outside it, or marked as excluded from capture, is never drawn into the frame.
Your machine encodes that one frame sequence and sends it, once, to the meeting service.
Every participant decodes the same stream. Every recorder, local or cloud, works from it.

The recording sits at the end of that pipeline, not at the start. A local recorder writes what the client already has. A cloud recorder writes what the servers already received. Neither goes back to step two for a second, more generous capture, because there is no mechanism for it to ask. So a window cropped out at step two is not in the recording, not in the transcript, and not in the interviewer's playback three weeks later. Same stream, same absence.

That mechanism is what OfferPilot AI uses. Its overlay is marked at the operating system level so the compositor strips it before any capturing application receives the frame, which puts it outside step two entirely. It is not blurred and not blacked out. The pixels never enter the stream, so they cannot enter any recording built from that stream, whether that is Zoom, Teams, Meet, OBS or a plain screenshot. The exclusion is on every plan, the free one included.

The Zoom local versus cloud difference people trip over

These get treated as one feature and behave differently in ways you only notice afterwards.

Local follows a person, cloud follows a setting. If the person recording locally is sitting in gallery view, the file is gallery view permanently, and no amount of editing recovers the speaker's larger frame. Cloud recording layout is chosen in account settings before anyone joins, and one session can be configured to produce several files, such as one following the active speaker and one showing the shared screen.
A local recording finishes after the meeting does. Zoom converts its raw capture into playable video when the meeting ends. Shut the laptop lid or kill the process at the wrong moment and the recorder is left with an unconverted file to repair. Cloud processing is server side and carries on without them.
Zoom's options change composition, not source. Settings that place participant video beside the shared screen, or write a separate audio file per participant, rearrange streams Zoom already has. None grants a recorder more of your desktop than you shared.
Only a host records to the cloud, but hosts can grant local recording. An attendee given permission produces a file on their own machine that the host never sees and cannot delete.

The same logic answers the question about other people. Another participant recording locally, or pointing OBS at their own meeting window, is capturing what arrived on their computer. They cannot request extra pixels from yours.

Prove it on your own machine in four minutes

Start a meeting with only yourself in it

Zoom, Teams and Meet will all happily host a meeting of one. It costs nothing and nobody sees the result.

Open a decoy window you would hate to leak

A notes file with obvious text works. Leave it visible on your own monitor, on top of everything else.

Share one window, then start recording

Pick a different window, not the display. Record for about thirty seconds and drag the decoy across the shared one while it runs.

Stop, open the file, and scrub through it

The decoy is not there. Repeat the test sharing the whole display and it will be there in full, along with any notification that happened to arrive. That contrast is the entire answer, demonstrated on your own hardware rather than taken on trust.

What this reasoning does not cover

All of the above concerns the meeting recording. Other things record screens and do not obey these rules.

Corporate endpoint software. Session recording, data loss prevention agents and remote support tools on a managed laptop capture the desktop directly, nowhere near the share pipeline. On a company machine, assume the machine can see itself.
Lockdown and proctored assessment environments. A lockdown browser or a proctoring client can take over the whole session and enforce its own rules. OfferPilot is the wrong tool there, and this page is not an argument for using it in one.
Anything with a lens. Webcam monitoring, an in-person observer, eye tracking, and a phone propped up as a second camera all sit outside the capture pipeline completely. Capture exclusion covers screen sharing, screen recording and screenshots. It does nothing about a camera, and eyes tracking repeatedly to one side read as exactly that on video.
Platform behaviour drifts. Menu labels, storage locations and which extras do or do not survive into a recording, whiteboards and annotations especially, have changed across releases and vary with the licence your organisation holds. The pipeline logic is stable. The details around it are not, so if your own test disagrees with this page, believe your test.
Practical scope. The overlay described here is Windows 10 and 11 only. No macOS, no Linux, no mobile, no browser extension. If you are on a Mac this is the wrong page to plan around, and the free tier exists so you learn that at no cost rather than on the day.

The short version

Recording and sharing are the same question asked twice. A recording holds what the share held, because both come from one capture that happened once on your machine. Share a window, the file holds a window. Share a display, the file holds a display, notifications and all. Choose the share carefully and the recording looks after itself. For a browser-based coding round that is also the cleanest setup: share the editor window only, and keep Code Copilot beside it on your own monitor.

Does a Zoom recording capture your whole screen, or only the meeting?