I think they're safe from going under, but do worry about them shutting my account down again by accident.
This is going to sound snarky but here goes ... Sounds like the problem is not wanting to store an admittedly large number of videos but not liking the service of the company doing it for you at no charge.
Average length of time of those videos is around 5 minutes, total size ~135 hours, or ~150-200GB.
I could store a personal mirror, of much larger size for almost nothing, disregarding legality of such, but the data is less important than the references in a large number of cases. I don't care about the content as much as the ideas the references help recall, in most cases.
They're pretty safe from going under now, but what about when the next big breakthrough is at a competitor? Presumably you want to keep your memories past the 5-10 year visibility that technology cycles at.
That's the part that really rubs me the wrong way. That, for example, your nest thermostat (or email, or phone, etc) might not work right because you uploaded the wrong video one day.
Nope, it was just the Youtube account. When they did the Google+ transition, I generated a new Google account for my Youtube account, but linked it to my normal Google account.
I actually found out about the account removal because of message in Gmail that I had missed for 2-3 days.
I should be upfront and say that I got banned for uploading a video that was deemed inappropriate. I don't really fault them for banning the account, I just wish they had given me the chance to back up my other perfectly appropriate videos. I know those videos probably still exist on some hard drive on a Google server.
When my ban occurred, I had reclaimed access in a total of 5-6 days, due to an urgency to make sure I got through before any cleanup occurred.
Nitpicky, but no he shouldn't, he should feel lucky, sure, but grateful? No, he should feel angry that it happened in the first place, and only somewhat placated that they restored it.
And yes, I'm absolutely livid still over the fact that their system couldn't observe a purely consumer account, with only a few small comments, could be flagged as copyright infringing. Had I been unable to reach a human for manual review of the nonsense of my account status, I'm positive I wouldn't have regained access.
$15/mo for the family plan.
Free as in money does not mean the same as free as in speech.
An hour of 720p = ~1.15GB
An hour per week for a year is ~60GB. On a hard drive, you can fit 30 years of data at that rate into a 2TB drive. Or you could put almost a year of data onto a dual-layer Blu-Ray disc (50GB).
^I personally have a really hard time seeing quality gains in video above that.
To do offsite, in case of fire, you can clone backups onto another harddrive or every few weeks or months onto blurays and store them at a relatives, safety deposit box, or somewhere else you consider safe and accessible. Or you are willing, for offsite matters, go a cloud provided like Google, Box, DropBox, which will charge you $10-20/mo for a TB of storage on their servers, you can use that.
I personally, don't use much offsite storage, for most of my data. I make occasional Blu-Ray or thumbdrive clones of important files and keep them in my bedroom, and accessible if I have to run. And while traveling I'll bring a set of thumbdrives with me.
It took me 4 days to get my account restored, and required calling into both Google and Youtube, as well as emailing, and contacting friends that worked at Google to get internal numbers. All because they have some system that accidentally flagged an account with zero uploads, and Google still lacks any real form of public customer service.