BigBlueButton Recording Archive
A dedicated archival and retrieval service that moves BigBlueButton recordings into an organization's own Google Drive, with a searchable dashboard and archival health monitoring.
What we built
BigBlueButton Recording Archive is a standalone commercial product: it automates moving BigBlueButton recordings out of origin-server storage into an organization's own Google Drive, then gives staff a searchable dashboard, role-based access, a built-in recording player, and monitoring that tracks upload status and failed jobs, rather than requiring anyone to browse a raw folder tree.
Recordings pile up faster than anyone can manage them
BigBlueButton recordings accumulate on the server that produced them, and server-attached storage is expensive to keep growing indefinitely. Institutions need long-term retention without paying for ever-larger origin servers. Once recordings do move somewhere else, non-technical staff still need to find a specific class session by date or course, not by navigating a raw file system or the BigBlueButton admin interface.
What the platform needed to do
- Automated, hands-off movement of recordings into cheap, organization-owned cloud storage.
- Search by date, title, or course context, not folder browsing.
- Role-based access so admins and instructors see only what they should.
- Visible failure: a failed upload has to surface, not disappear silently.
- Built-in playback so staff don't need a separate video tool.
Architecture
An archival worker moves each recording into the organization's own Google Drive, then indexes it into a searchable dashboard while reporting upload status and failures to a health-monitoring layer. Data ownership stays with the organization, not with Bymond.
What was actually hard
Data ownership without lock-in
Recordings move into the organization's own Google Drive rather than a Bymond-hosted bucket, so an institution keeps its recordings even if it stops using the product. The tradeoff is engineering around Google Drive's own API and reliability characteristics instead of a purpose-built object store.
Making a folder tree searchable
Google Drive alone is folder and filename browsing. The dashboard maintains its own metadata index (date, title, course context), so staff never have to know or navigate the underlying folder structure to find a specific class recording.
Failure has to be loud
An archival job that fails silently leaves an institution believing a recording is safely archived when it isn't. Health checks and failed-job tracking are core to the pipeline, surfaced on the dashboard rather than buried in a log file.
Role-appropriate access
Administrators and instructors need different visibility into the archive: an instructor generally shouldn't see another course's recordings. That had to work without duplicating BigBlueButton's own permission model from scratch.
How it fits together
An archival worker automates the transfer from BigBlueButton's recording output into the organization's own Google Drive account, so an institution never loses access to its recordings even if it stops using the service. On top of that storage layer sits a dashboard that indexes recordings by date, title, and course, so staff search rather than browse. Role-based access separates what administrators and instructors can see, and the same pipeline that moves a recording also reports its own health: upload status and failed jobs are first-class signals, not something discovered after a recording turns out to be missing.
What it's built on
Running it, not just building it
- Reliability: archival health monitoring tracks upload status and failed jobs as part of the pipeline itself.
- Data ownership: recordings live in the organization's own Google Drive account, not a Bymond-controlled bucket.
- Access: published as a real commercial product with a free trial and published monthly/setup pricing, serving K-12 and higher-education institutions, coaching services, corporate training teams, and other BigBlueButton hosting operators.
See it in context
Need a storage or archival pipeline built around real operational failure modes?
Recording retention, media processing, or any pipeline where a silent failure would matter: tell us what you're dealing with.