Can You Get Back a Meeting You Deleted From Your AI Notetaker?

It depends on which app you deleted it from

You are clearing out test calls and duplicates, and one of the rows you select is the pricing call from Tuesday. Whether that call still exists depends entirely on the notetaker you used, and on the current help pages the answers split cleanly in two.

Otter and Granola move a deleted meeting to a trash and keep it there for 30 days. Fireflies and Fathom delete it when you confirm, and their own help pages say it cannot be recovered. That difference never comes up in a demo, because nobody deletes anything during a trial.

Two keep a trash, two do not

Otter's help page on deleting a conversation says it goes to the Trash folder for 30 days, shows the time left on each item, and lets you restore it or delete it forever. Empty Trash Now removes everything at once and cannot be undone. Otter also says deleting a conversation does not give you back the transcription minutes it used, so deleting test calls will not free up your monthly allowance.

Granola's page says a trashed note sits in a trash can at the bottom of the left sidebar, restored with the back arrow, and is permanently deleted after 30 days. One catch: the trash is on the Mac, Windows and Android apps. If you deleted the note on an iPhone, you have to open Granola on one of those to get it back.

Fireflies' guide says only the meeting owner can delete a meeting, that deleted meetings are permanently removed and cannot be recovered, and that the transcript, summary, recording and all related data go with it. Bulk delete, including selecting every meeting at once, is on Pro and above. Fathom's help page says deleting a call recording also removes all its notes, and that a deleted call cannot be recovered because Fathom does not store the data.

So with Fireflies and Fathom, the confirm dialog is the only safety net you get. Read it before you click.

Deleting can also take it away from everyone else

The person who loses a meeting is often not the person who deleted it. Otter's page says a deleted conversation is immediately unshared from all users and Channels. It does not say whether restoring it shares it again, so if a colleague relied on that conversation, check its sharing after you restore it.

In both Otter and Fireflies only the owner can delete a meeting, which protects you from teammates. The flip side is that a teammate who depended on a meeting you recorded has no undo of their own. In Fireflies there is no undo for anyone.

Is a deleted meeting still in your AI answers?

This is the question the help pages skip. If a meeting sits in a trash for 30 days, can the AI chat still read it and quote it back to you or to a colleague? Neither Granola's nor Otter's page says either way. If you delete a meeting because it was recorded by mistake, or because it holds something that should not be repeated, the answer matters more than the restore button.

The reverse matters too. If you restore a meeting, it should come back into search and answers, and into the same folder it left. Ask the vendor both questions in writing, or test them yourself.

A two minute test before you rely on it

Record a throwaway call, say a short call with a colleague in which you mention one made up project name. File it in a folder and share it with that colleague. Then:

• Delete it and look for a trash. Note how many days it says you have.
• Ask your colleague whether it vanished for them too.
• Ask the AI chat about the made up project name while the call is in the trash.
• Restore it and check it came back to the same folder, still shared, and answerable again.
• Try to delete it permanently, so you know where the point of no return is.

How it works in Driffle

Deleting a meeting or a note in Driffle moves it to Trash, where each item shows the days it has left, 30 by default. Restore puts it back where it was: deleting only marks the item, so its folder and the people who could see it are unchanged. While it is in Trash it drops out of search and out of Ask, so no answer cites it, and it comes back when you restore it. The meeting can be deleted by the person who recorded it, or by an owner of the folder or space it is filed in, including a workspace admin. Someone who can only edit it cannot.

One limit cuts the other way. A note can be deleted forever from Trash straight away, but a recorded meeting cannot: it stays in Trash until its 30 days are up and is then removed automatically, along with the transcript, summary and decisions extracted from it. If you need a meeting gone today rather than in a month, Trash will not do that.

Driffle runs on Macs with Apple Silicon, and transcription and the AI run in the cloud. If you want to run the two minute test on it yourself, you can get Driffle at driffle.ai/download.