Retain Google Chat messages with Vault

With the launch of launch of Chat in Meet, Google Chat will create a series of Meeting conversations up to 7 days in advance of a meeting. These meetings will show up in your admin space management tool and audit logging and reporting. Note, that any unused meeting conversation will be auto-deleted within 8 days from the creation date.

Note: Further updates are coming in the next few months.

Vault

When continuous meeting chat is turned on, meeting conversations are saved as spaces in Chat. These conversations are also subject to your organization's Google Chat data retention policies and data loss prevention (DLP) rules. DLP rules for anonymous users don't apply to meeting conversations.

Meeting level host setting

If a meeting host turns off continuous meeting chat, in-meeting messages will revert to the old experience. Messages aren't saved in Google Chat and aren't subject to your organization's data retention policies. For more details, go to how to use Chat with Google Meet.

• Admin settings—Currently, you cannot turn off Meeting conversations for your whole domain. Note, that this feature is in development.
• Admin console—External, drop-in, and anonymous user activity in meeting conversations is included in log events reporting.

Meeting conversations will begin to show in the spaces section in Admin space management and reporting. Meeting conversations are system generated, so all Meeting conversations are available via audit logs whether they're used or not. You can find these logs in the Google Admin console under ReportingAudit and investigationChat log events.

As part of the continuous meeting launch, you may notice an increase in reported space usage.

Because Meeting conversations are now Chat spaces created by the system, you will notice changes in four specific areas of the Admin console. This activity is expected behavior.

Apps Reports

Apps report data can be found under ReportsApps ReportsGoogle Chat.

You may observe an increase in the Created spaces metric within the Chat reports graph. This increase reflects the system automatically generating spaces 7 days prior to scheduled meetings. This is not necessarily indicative of increased manual user activity.

Space Management Tool

Meeting conversations can be accessed in the Space Management Tool under AppsGoogle WorkspaceSettings for Google ChatManage Spaces.

These spaces are managed like any other Chat spaces, though they will be automatically deleted if unused. For more information, see Automatic Meeting Chat conversation deletion below.

Note: We are looking into separating system-created conversations in a future update to reduce clutter in this view.

Audit and Investigation

The creation of these spaces generates Room created events in the Chat audit logs.

The creation of these spaces generates Room created events in the Chat audit logs. These can be found under ReportingAudit and investigationChat log events.

Note: Even though these spaces are system-generated, the Actor field in the audit log will list the meeting organizer. This indicates the user on whose behalf the space was prepared.

Vault and Takeout

If you initiate a domain-wide takeout with continuous meeting chats active, you may experience an increase in space volume due to the addition of system generated spaces.

The default retention rule applies to all DMs, group messages, meeting conversations, and Chat spaces in your organization.

A custom retention rule can apply to different sets of messages:

If more than one custom retention rule applies to a message, the message is retained according to the custom rule that expires last.

To retain all messages (DMs, group messages, and messages in spaces) with custom retention rules, you must create at least two rules. You create one rule for all Chat spaces to cover messages in spaces and certain group conversations, and create another rule for your top organizational unit to cover DMs and group messages.

Learn more about the differences between group messages and spaces.

Note: Unlike Gmail and Groups retention rules, you can’t use terms to target Chat retention rules to messages associated with specific accounts or that contain specific keywords.

Direct messages

1:1 Direct Messages (DMs) are owned by the organization of the chat participant who creates the conversation. This is often, but not necessarily the person who sends the first message.

When the participants in a chat are in the same organization but covered by different retention rules, the longer of the two retention rules applies. For example, participant 1 is in an organizational unit subject to a retention rule that purges DMs after 7 days and they chat with participant 2 who’s in an organizational unit subject to an indefinite retention rule for DMs. Both participants will have access to the direct messages indefinitely, and a Vault search for either participant will return messages for both users indefinitely. 

DMs with external users

Regardless of ownership, when participants belong to different organizations, DMs are retained according to the retention rules of each organization.

For example, Company A retains DMs for 1 week and Company B retains DMs for 2 years. Vault will retain DMs for Company A’s admins for 1 week and Company B’s admins for 2 years. Chat has a 30-day retention period that keeps messages for 30 days after they're deleted by a retention or auto-deletion policy. During that period, the messages are still available in Vault. After the Chat retention period ends, the DM is no longer available in Vault for either company.

Note: The retention policy for the owning organization is applied to conversations in the product UI, while the policy for each organization applies to the messages in Vault. There may be cases where users would have longer visibility into messages than their admin, such as when the owning organization's user has a longer retention policy than the guest admin. In these cases, we will extend Vault visibility to match at least the user visibility.

Chat spaces

When you set a default retention rule or create a custom retention rule for Chat, Vault can retain messages only in spaces (including meeting conversations) that have history turned on. Chat retention rules set for organizational units don’t apply to messages in spaces.

External users in Chat spaces

When participants belong to different organizations, the conversation is retained according to the rules of the organization of the space's creator. If users in your organization participate in spaces owned by another organization, those messages aren’t available to Vault for retention, holds, search, or export.

Chat retention rules don't have the option to purge only messages deleted by users. A retention rule with an expiration purges all messages when the retention period expires.

Google Chat automatically and permanently deletes empty and inactive system generated conversations (such as meeting conversations). Meeting conversations may be system generated up to 7-days before a meeting is scheduled to start.

System generated conversations are deleted only if all of these conditions are met:

• The space contains no user-generated messages, whether visible or soft-deleted. System-generated messages (e.g., users joining or leaving) are excluded.
• No pinned resources or tasks.
• The space isn't emailable. Learn more.
• No user activity (for example, message sends, file uploads, participant changes) has taken place in the conversation for the past 8 consecutive days.

  Note: This only occurred after 30 days in November and early December 2025, but has since been reduced to 8 days. You may see a spike in activity for this duration, but it should reduce significantly in the future.

This deletion of user generated or system generated conversations includes the conversation name and membership list. This process does not conflict with Google Vault message retention policies or legal holds, as it only applies to conversations confirmed to have no messages.

Administrators can find deletion records for Chat audit logs in the Google Admin console.

Google Chat automatically and permanently deletes empty and inactive conversations (Group direct messages and spaces). This occurs only if all these conditions are met:

• The space contains no user-generated messages, whether visible or soft-deleted. System-generated messages (for example, users joining or leaving) are excluded.
• There are no pinned resources or tasks.
• You can't email the space. For details, go to Email a space in Google Chat.
• There has been no user activity in the conversation for the past 30 consecutive days. For example, there were no message sends, file uploads, or participant changes.
• The space is not under migration.

The deletion includes the conversation name and membership list. The space is put into a soft-deleted state for 60 days. During this time, although users cannot access it, Google Vault allows licensed administrators to fetch information. At the end of the 60 days, the space is permanently purged. This process doesn't conflict with Google Vault message retention policies or legal holds, as it only applies to conversations confirmed to have no messages.

If you are using migration mode to migrate messages to Chat, all spaces must migrate within 90 days.

Spaces in migration mode have a strict 90 day time to launch, during which time a migration app must import all content to the space and exit the space out of migration mode. If a space hasn't exited migration mode by day 90, it will be auto-purged from storage. After a space exits migration mode, standard Vault retention rules will apply.