Yep, I did that at the time, for the important videos. Still haven't found a good playlist backup, aside from using the API, not wanting to store all those videos (something like 2000 videos at this point across 30 lists, not including my watchlist or likes which is ~2500 videos).

I think they're safe from going under, but do worry about them shutting my account down again by accident.

youtube-dl handles playlist backup, annotation download, subtitles, thumbnails, etc. - no need to download the video or anything you don't want to (or you can download postage stamp previews, etc). shrug best archival solution I've found so far.

> Yep, I did that at the time, for the important videos. Still haven't found a good playlist backup, aside from using the API, not wanting to store all those videos (something like 2000 videos at this point ...

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.

Advertising or data-mining supported services are not free. We are still paying in time or headspace or personal data, so it is perfectly valid to have a problem with the quality of service we receive in exchange for that payment.

That's fair, most of the videos have no or little personal value, if bit rot occurred I most likely wouldn't notice up to around a 20% change.

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.

> I think they're safe from going under

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.

But Google might add an invisible watermark to your video.