How to record and keep your missionary's weekly video call

The weekly call is where they say the things a letter never gets to. The tired week. The name of the person who let them in. The way they laugh at something that happened on a bus. Then the screen goes dark and none of it exists anywhere.

If you have searched for how to record it, you will have noticed that almost nothing useful comes back. So here is the whole thing, plainly.

If you read nothing else: there is one method that works on every app, on every plan, on every phone, and it costs nothing. Put the call on speaker, and record the room with a second device. Everything below is either an easier version of that or a reason you might not need it.

We make a product, and it is described near the bottom in one section you can skip. The steps above it work without it.

First, is this allowed

In February 2019 the Church announced that missionaries may communicate with their families each week on preparation day — by letter and email as before, and now also by text message, online messaging, phone call and video chat. Before that, calls home happened twice a year. The contact is meant to happen on preparation day, and in most missions it is the missionary who places the call rather than the family.

That is the permission for the call itself. Recording it is a family matter rather than a Church one, so far as we can find — we know of no published Church guidance either way. Your missionary's own mission may have specifics the general announcement does not cover, so the person to ask is them.

We should say plainly that Missionary Legacy is an independent company. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Say it out loud at the start

Recording law differs by state, and your missionary is almost certainly in a different one — or a different country, which has its own rules again. Working out which law governs a call between Boise and Manila is a genuinely hard question and not one you should have to answer at seven on a Monday evening.

You do not have to answer it. There is one rule that keeps you right everywhere it could possibly matter: tell everyone, at the start, every time, and wait for a yes.

One sentence covers it.

"Before we start — I'm recording this so we can keep it for the family. Is everyone all right with that?"

Say it while the recording is running, so the answer is on the recording. If anyone says no, do not record that call. Do not record secretly, and do not put a family call anywhere public. This is general information rather than legal advice, and if the situation is complicated for you, ask someone qualified.

The method that works on every app

Do this one first, even if you plan to use something cleverer. It has no plan requirements, no permissions, no software, and nothing to go wrong.

1. Put the call on speaker — the laptop's own speakers, or the phone's speakerphone. Not headphones.
2. On a second device, open the plain voice recorder that came with it. On an iPhone that is Voice Memos. On Android it is usually Recorder or Voice Recorder.
3. Set that second device a foot or so from the speaker, screen up, and plug it into power.
4. Press record before you dial, say the sentence above, and leave it alone.

Two things that catch people out. The recording device must not be the device on the call — an iPhone will not run Voice Memos during a live call. And you should test it once, this week, on a thirty-second practice recording that you then listen back to. Sound is the one thing you cannot check by looking at it.

It will sound a little roomy. It will also be a real recording of a real evening in your kitchen, and in ten years nobody will mind.

Google Meet

Meet can record itself, but only on some accounts. A free personal Google account cannot record, and neither can Workspace Business Starter. Recording comes with the paid Workspace editions from Business Standard upwards, and with Workspace Individual; Google has at times extended it to some consumer Google One plans as well, so check Google's own support page for the account you have. The reliable test is in the meeting itself, below.

If the account qualifies, in the meeting:

1. At the bottom right, click Meeting tools, then Recording. On some layouts this sits behind the Activities icon.
2. Click Start recording, then Start in the pop-up.
3. To stop: Meeting tools, Recording, Stop recording, and Stop recording again to confirm.

The file lands in the meeting organiser's Google Drive, in a folder called Google Meet, with a subfolder per meeting. Which matters more than it sounds: if your missionary starts the meeting, the recording saves into their missionary.org Drive, and that account closes after they come home. Start the meeting from your own account, or move each recording out the same week. The organiser and whoever started the recording both get an email with the link.

One detail worth knowing: recording and transcription are two separate switches. Turning on the recording does not produce a transcript. Turn both on, because the transcript is what makes the call searchable later.

If Recording is greyed out or missing, the account does not have it. Do not spend the call hunting for it — fall back to the second device.

Zoom

Zoom's free Basic plan does allow recording, with real limits.

1. Join from the desktop app on Windows, Mac or Linux. Local recording does not work from the phone or tablet apps.
2. You must be the host. A guest's record button is locked until the host grants access during the call.
3. Click Record, then choose Record on this Computer.
4. A red indicator appears at the top left and everyone in the meeting sees a notice that recording has started.
5. Click Stop Recording when you are done.

The recording is converted into a playable file when the meeting ends, and saves by default into a Zoom folder inside Documents. Do not shut the laptop until the conversion has finished.

Zoom's free plan also caps a meeting at forty minutes. When it ends, everyone rejoins the same link and you get a second file. Name both files carefully or you will lose track of which half is which.

Screen recording on a Mac

1. Press Shift + Command + 5.
2. Choose Record Entire Screen.
3. Click Options and pick your microphone under Microphone. The microphone list only appears once a recording mode is selected.
4. Click Record. Stop from the menu bar at the top right.

Here is the catch nobody mentions: the Mac's built-in recorder captures the microphone, not the sound coming out of the speakers. If you wear headphones you will record yourself talking to silence.

So play the call through the laptop's own speakers and let the microphone hear both sides. That is the second-device method again, with the laptop doing both jobs.

You may also need to grant permission first, in System Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Screen & System Audio Recording. Recent versions of macOS re-confirm this periodically, so a setup that worked in the spring can start producing a black recording in the autumn. Test before you rely on it.

Screen recording on Windows

1. Press the Windows key + G to open Game Bar.
2. In the Capture widget, click the record button.
3. Click the microphone icon in the same widget to include your voice. Win + Alt + M toggles it during recording.

Game Bar records the active app window along with its sound. Two limits: it captures one window at a time rather than your whole desktop, and it refuses some windows outright, including File Explorer and anything copy-protected. If it will not cooperate on the night, do not fight it. Use the second device.

FaceTime and WhatsApp: the honest answer

Neither has a recording feature, and no setting turns one on.

Worse, the iPhone's own screen recorder will not save you. It records the picture, but a screen recording of a FaceTime call comes out with no call audio in it. You get a silent video of your child's face moving, which is the most disappointing possible result and one you only discover afterwards.

WhatsApp calls are end-to-end encrypted and have no recording function either.

If FaceTime or WhatsApp is how your family calls, you have two options. Record the room with a second device, as above. Or ask your missionary to switch the weekly call to Google Meet or Zoom — it is one change, it takes one week to become the new normal, and it makes every other step on this page easier.

Where the file should live afterwards

The recording is not safe on the device that made it. Phones are lost, dropped and traded in.

• Move it off within a day. To a computer, then to a cloud folder, then to an external drive.
• Rename it immediately, date first. 2026-09-07 week 14 Cebu call.m4a. Dates written year-month-day sort themselves into order for you, forever, on every device.
• Two copies in two places, and make one of them somewhere that is not the same account as the other.
• Do not re-encode it. Keep the original file. Every conversion loses a little and gains you nothing.
• Keep plain formats — .m4a, .mp3, .mp4. These will still open in ten years. A proprietary app format may not.
• Share the folder with grandparents and siblings. An archive one person can reach is one hard drive away from being gone.

If you have to choose between keeping the video and keeping the audio, keep the audio. The video file is many times larger, and the voice is the part that cannot be recovered.

How to keep it findable in ten years

The thing that destroys a family archive is not usually loss. It is a folder of ninety files called recording_3.m4a that nobody can face opening.

Two minutes after each call, do this:

• Rename the file with the date, the mission week, and the area.
• Add one line to a plain text file or spreadsheet kept in the same folder: the date, who was on the call, and one sentence about what he talked about.
• If something in the call mattered, note the minute. 18:00 — the story about the bus in Cebu. That single habit is the difference between an archive and a pile.

A transcript is what makes audio searchable at all — you can search words, not sound. If your platform makes one, keep it as a text file beside the recording. If it does not, your one-line note is a workable substitute.

One thing we make

This is the part you can skip.

Missionary Legacy archives a missionary's letters, chats, photos and calls, and the weekly call is the piece this article exists for. Your archive gets one permanent call room, and anyone you invite walks straight in without knocking. The join link for it is shown on the call page each week, so you copy it from there rather than keeping one written down. You tap who is joining as you open it, and that narrows the list of people a voice could belong to — a name is only put on a voice when someone in the call actually uses it.

The recorder keeps the audio, not the video of the weekly call. If the video matters to you, use the steps above — we would rather tell you that than let you find out later. The audio is transcribed, voices are matched against your family's real names, and a voice it cannot place is labelled "Home" rather than guessed at. A wrong name beside someone's words is a false record, not a typo.

There is also a recorder in the app that works with any calling app at all — Meet, WhatsApp, Messenger, FaceTime — for the same reason the second-device method works: the microphone hears both sides of a call on speaker.

Standard is $19 a month and Premium is $24. The only difference between them is that on Premium the recorder joins your family call by itself so nobody has to remember, and video is archived alongside the photos — anyone's video, theirs or yours. On Standard a clip is not pulled into the archive; it stays wherever it came from, and you can see which ones were left. Everything else — letters, chats, transcripts of a call you recorded yourself — is identical on both. Setup is $49 once, and there is a 14-day trial.

Two honest limits. We are not printing books yet. And there is no export button. Ask us and a person will send you what we hold about you — your profile, the letters you wrote, the photos you added, your orders — by hand; a single file containing an entire archive, every photo and recording and transcript together, is not something we can produce yet. Which is the same reason this article puts the free methods first: keep your own copy of anything you could not bear to lose, whoever is holding it for you.

The checklist

1. Ask your missionary what their mission's rules are.
2. Do a thirty-second test recording this week, and listen back to it.
3. Decide which method you are using before the call starts, not during it.
4. Say the sentence out loud at the start, every time, while recording.
5. Move the file off the recording device within a day.
6. Rename it with the date first, then the week and the area.
7. Add one line to your index file: who was on, what he talked about, the minute of anything worth going back for.
8. Two copies, two places. Tell one other person where they are.

You will not do all of this every week, and that is fine. Do steps four and six every week and you will have something worth having.