I would go even further: Always have a local backup of anything on the Internet that is important to you, whether you made it or not, unless you know there are many other accessible versions of it for redundancy. You never know when a large company will delete it without notice.

(Is this feasible? Perhaps not, but given how cheap storage is, if this could be even semi-automated, it would easily save a lot of heartache for some at many points in their life, especially in the worst cases of things like their Google accounts being banned)

If you archive youtube content, consider stopping by my discord server. https://discord.gg/EJvS4kf

I maintain a list of content that various members have archived, such that if anything is removed, people can direct inquiries to people who have archived that content.

It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived, and direct efforts toward at-risk channels.

(You can see the current list of user-archived content here: https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w)

This is great; is there any view towards rehosting this stuff on peertube or whatever? Or is it okay for now, to just know that it's sitting on someone's disk, as long as we know how to reach that someone if needed?

That sounds like a good way to get it all DMCAd

I've considered uploading to a peertube instance, but I ran into an issue where the instance seemed to have a policy prohibiting mirroring existing/live channels.

For the moment I make my archive available via Soulseek, and am open to requests!

I'm not surprised that there are policies against people reuploading other peoples content.

ArchiveTeam has a larger YouTube archival effort running (on IRC, hackint/#youtube-archive) -- I think the channel list is on the order of tens of thousands. You can email me or ping me on IRC if you want to setup some coordination effort (no sense in doing duplicate work).

Correction: #youtubearchive (also, not an official ArchiveTeam effort)

Not very wise of you to depend on Discord and Google Sheets instead of more open alternatives when you're organizing a group whose purpose is to literally preserve the victims of corporate censorship.

That's fair. I take automatic backups of the sheet, such that if access to that is eventually lost I can republish via another method.

Discord is used for the simple reason that the current goal is to gain as much traction and participation as possible. The Rocketchat server I host, and the IRC channels I could have used would both acted as barriers of entry to a lot of possible participants.

Perhaps with time I can push for a migration to a solution I host. For the moment I'll stick with these tools, and plan for their failure as best I can.

I'd suggest matrix. It may be the closest you can currently come to something self hosted where most people with reading skills can figure out how to join.

There's certainly irony there, but then they're actually getting on with stuff rather than debating tooling. Discord and sheets are also both free - anything else is going to require an investment of money and time.

This 1000%. I can't tell you how many times I click a link, find it's broken, plug it into Wayback Machine, only to find it was never indexed, or the images weren't archived, or only the homepage was indexed, etc.

Agreed. Nowadays if I found anything really interesting and not a video I'll just save the while webpage in local. Usually only the texts and pictures matter so when I reopen them the webpages still look OK.

I wonder how to trigger archive.org spiders...

>Always have a local backup of anything on the Internet that is important to you

Also would be a nice service to others to create a backup on archive.today and archive.org, and similar sites.

Seconded. My go-to for site archival is HTTRACK but there may be more modern tools that handle active content better.

Does this work on all the dumb SPAs of today?

I find it so goofy that people never bother to save a local backup of work they spent hours and hours curating.

Have they never ever written an essay on Microsoft Word and then lost the progress cause they never saved it on a floppy?

Videos are big. I have a YouTube channel and don't back my videos up. Quite the opposite, I regularly delete them to free up harddisk space. I do cross post them to lbry.tv though which I've found a lot better than peertube.

First time I've heard of lbry.tv - just curious, what's the main attraction for you?

Features and monetization. Peer tube instances had serious upload limits, and it’s been a while since I looked but there were some major missing features like descriptions or editing or something. I actually really like pornhub’s monetization options but there is no audience there for the videos I make. Lbry struck a balance between features and not a porn site.

I make computer security videos so there is a non negligible chance my YouTube will get deleted.

I think they are as close to uncensorable as you can get. See https://lbry.tech

>I don't see people finding meaningful content on it

I think the problem is that "meaningful content" doesn't really matter. Ever heard of mukbang? Or reaction videos? Lots of people understand that if you make a 10 minute video that can be used as background noise while working or playing video games, you can make a lot of money. Youtube has to be aware of this, which would explain why they so quickly take down any video that advertisers might not like.

It may become a dinosaur to people who value quality content, but go search the topics I mentioned and compare the view counts to the types of videos you normally watch.

On one hand people preach "always have a local backup" and on the other "back ups on google drive is super easy". heh.

i guess we should get ready for next decade hearing a lot of "Have you lost pictures and memories of loved ones on Google Drive or a service affiliated with AWS? We at lawyer & lawyer ..."

You can back up on the cloud and locally.

Maybe when everybody has gbit+ upload speeds at home. I know I would host a lot more things from home if I had better upload at home.

And it's not really backed up unless you have a backup of the backup.

It's not really backed up if you haven't proven you can read the "backup".

Yep! I had a department head tell me that we shouldn't prioritize a fix for an SQL injection vulnerability (with full schema privileges!) for a critical system because we have a backup service. I then asked if we've tested it - Nope. I then asked if we had documentation on how to do it - Nope. I left that department as soon as I could.

Was there no concern about an attacker being able to -read- the contents, as well?

Not really. It was an internal application, which greatly reduced the risk. The type of information wouldn't be very useful to an attacker. The main problem is that there are developers and business people who also run some SQL and use the system. If they accidentally paste SQL into a search box, it will execute. They could drop tables or anything, even in PRD. If someone were disgruntled or an attacker gained access they could intentionally wipeout the database.

Beyond that, would suggest Youtubers peer their content on a few of the upstarts. I've started using Bitchute and Odysee a bit more.

one of the biggest issues with peer tube is of course discoverability, but also that most instances don't give you any real space to work with to publish content as well.

Shouldnt they allow data export in a way that could be used to upload all content to a different platform? I think that's GDPR data portability clause. Unless YouTube is exempt (and probably technically is exempt as no civil servant will dare to touch such a giant)