a TorrentFreak article got me spooked so I fired up the ol’ yt-dlp. Got the entire channel, including comments, description metadata, and thumbnail images.
A significant number of videos were actually unavailable because of an odd YouTube bug where 15+ year old videos were listed as “currently being processed”. I may re-run this later (since I ran it in archive file mode) to get the missing videos, as it seems there may be about 300 out of 4911 videos missing.
Nice! What’re you gonna do with them? Are you gonna upload them somewhere, or just hold onto them?
They still happily exist on YouTube- for now. So no point in re-hosting, they’ll get squirreled away into the Giant Hard Drive of Doom.
If something happens to the actual archive project in the near future, I’ll likely section them up into 20gb pieces and post them out on a torrent someplace.
Just upload it to archive.org before your backup dies. No need to hoard it for yourself.
Gives an idea of the amount of data YouTube is storing, if only this one channel is 250GB!
makes me wonder how the whole thing is sustainable for them, on average it seems about 6gb per 100 videos
Plan to do this with a lot of the entertainment videos I watch, considering how ban happy some websites have been with content creators, being able to still see their craft after it is gone is worthwhile.
Just need to buy a fuckton of storage though
Nice
Nice!
Could you fell us what tool you used to also get the description text and the comments? With dlp i only found the option of downloading the video itself.
yt-dlp does support fetching comments and description text - if you use the --write-info-json and --write-comments options, it will save them as a JSON file alongside other video metadata.
