People who have limited storage resources? One of the wonderful things about making content for YouTube is its low barrier to entry, and that probably includes a lot of people using their mom's hand-me-down MacBook Air. Maybe people who haven't been bitten by significant data loss before? Sure, it usually only takes once, but maybe that would be their first time? Lots of young people on that platform that are probably really used to everything just kind of automatically being backed up in a cloud somewhere.

Someone not having your level of prudence and understanding in their MO doesn't mean they're idiots. Did you learn everything you know by reading the docs and best practices recommendations and acting accordingly, or did it take a couple of stinging mistakes to bring you to where you are? Your attitude is the stuff that nightmare bosses/parents/teachers/mentors are made of. Mellow out.

It's more common than you think.

Dustin, from Smarter Every Day, has millions of subscribes and keeps his backup copies on old hard drives loosely placed into plastic containers. He also causally tosses them around.

He's hardly and idiot but...

Here's the video where Linus sets him up a 160tb server to replace his old "backup solution". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcWSrIiR1tY

*Destin

I think it's not that someone intentionally does that, it's that daily creators or those that make large quantities of videos simply run out of space or get overwhelmed by how much storage is needed over time.

There are many videos by creators chronicling the solutions they've had to contrive to preserve their records and the cost/time tradeoffs they've made to continue creating while saving their archives.

Video files are large, so you usually have to store them on some kind of external disk. And it's very possible to lose an external disk. If videos are your livelihood then I imagine you're going to be a lot more disciplined than that but there are plenty of hobbyist vloggers out there.

I manage petabytes of storage of media content. While this content is not mine, I'm just saying I'm fully aware of the size of video content. My personal video archive is in the hundreds of TBs. I have put forth the effort to save my content in multiple formats aw well as locally, offsite, and in the cloud. I'm saving RAW content. Most "YouTubers" are producing MP4 video content which is tiny compared to RAW. If I can do it, they can too. I guarantee YouTubers making money are making way more money than I am.

I'm gonna go ahead and assume that to someone who manages petabytes of video content, the importance of backing up video content is more obvious than it is to, say, a non-technical person with a hobby toy unboxing channel. If it was indeed knowledge that is as common and obvious as your attitude suggests, then you probably wouldn't be making any money at all.

Perhaps it's a matter of tone not coming across well through text, but you seem to be bizarrely angry at people on YouTube in general, even more so if they don't back up their video files.

> I guarantee YouTubers making money are making way more money than I am.

You would be incorrect. The overwhelming majority of video uploaders on YouTube have never made a single cent.

You misread that. My guarantee is if a YouTuber is making any money, they are making more than I do. That implies that I am not making any money on my video that I am storing, yet I still back it up properly.

Some people do it intentionally to "move on".