I have one video in my favorites that is marked as unavailable. This drives me crazy I'll never know what that video was. I only have a couple videos in my favorites and every single one of them is important to me.

If you can back them up.

I have hundreds of missing videos in my various lists.

I wish youtube would at least keep the title there so you know what it is that has been lost.

Welcome to the alzheimic future.

That’s a feature. If somebody deletes their video then all of the metadata goes with it. I agree that it can be annoying but among other things, it’s the law.

> it’s the law

Where?

Other sites keep the metadata (and even allow new comments on) deleted posts.

GDPR text asks to delete all data for which the user withdraws consent to share. IANAL but that seems telling.

When a user asks to delete a video it’s deleted, with it goes the title and description.

We've always been at war with Eastasia.

I love me a random 1984 reference… care to explain what’s wrong with honouring user requests to delete their data?

In my opinion, once the video is added to my list, at least the name should become my data.

Also I seriously doubt that all those missing videos were requested to be deleted by the user. I'd be willing to bet that 90% of them were taken down by youtube's ridiculous and mostly broken takedown bots. There should be consequences for frivolous takedowns.

The idea that all or most of these missing videos are due to GDPR deletion requests is completely incorrect. They are almost all from spurious copyright takedown requests. YouTube has no legal obligation to automatically honor these, and it certainly doesn't have to delete all associated metadata. Framing this issue as an instance of YouTube being respectful of their users data is ridiculous.

Yep. If this worked properly and the metadata went out with the video so should the entry. The blank entry is absolutely useless

I had the same problem with a few old videos in my favourites. Google search for the alphanumeric text after "watch?v=" in the URL of the video. In most cases, you will find some information about the video from pages where it might have been embedded.

I despise the memory hole Google dumps things into. As far as YouTube is concerned a deleted video might as well never have existed.

The alternative, that Google doesn't delete stuff that people want deleted, is worse. They can't win either way.

They could delete the video content and leave a sanitized version of the metadata. For instance leave the post date and title while removing the description and owner information.

Searching for a video's URL might let you find some metadata about it. Unfortunately YouTube encourages social media insulation so a video might have only ever been referenced inside of YouTube with no inbound links from the web.

You can easily imagine situations for which the title itself contains information that someone would rather have deleted. Per GDPR and similar regs, if you want that deleted, it has to be.

It's the uploader's video, and they retain ownership of it. If they want it gone, it'll be gone. Since they own the IP, their interests matter more than some random viewer who happened to add it to a playlist some time in the past.

Does youtube-dl support playlists?

Oh yes it does! It is amazing. With the `--download-archive` option you can specify a text file where it stores which videos it already downloaded. So you can periodically make backups of your playlists without unnecessarily downloading videos that you already have.

yeah it will try to download a whole playlist if you give it the URL of the playlist. Last I tried.

I have a script running nightly to backup my playlists

I run a discord server for others downloading youtube content.

We maintain a list [1] of content that various members have archived, such that when content is removed from youtube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content. It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived.

We are currently organizing some efforts to find and download unlisted videos.

Feel free to check us out here: https://discord.gg/EJvS4kf

[1] https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w

How many playlists do you have/create daily?

Just half a dozen. I only backup a set list of playlists (just an array of playlist IDs in bash I periodically change).

Or uploaders who have died and may have unlisted videos and linked to them in descriptions or comments.

I don't recall the creator, but I do recall a video series that used links in the videos that pointed to other videos for a basic quiz or choose your own adventure.

VlogBrothers did a sort of YouTube game show series that way some years ago.

Jacksfilms did that once.

For many years now I "favourite" videos on YT by downloading them. You can't expect any video on YT to still be there tomorrow/later.

Honestly I have been doing this with all kinds of content, if I ever reference it to make a point, use it to understand a topic, etc I have a local backup of the video, webpage etc.

Too many times I have gone back to reference something only for the site to be dead, or the user been banned from the platform.

Data you don't have in at least two places, is data you don't want.

This applies to logical places on the internet too.

Of course, you don't need to keep a copy of everything you see on the internet. But if you have a dependency you might want a copy.

wget was the thing back then, maybe something similar with youtube-dl now?

Yes. I always tell people that if they really love a YouTube video they need to archive it themselves. Tons and tons of content gets erased all the time for many different reasons. Just recently I found two of my favorite channels, popular around a decade ago, had deleted almost all their content because their jokes were too offensive for today's audience and they wanted to project a more mature aesthetic. That would've been a huge chunk of my early adulthood gone forever if I hadn't already had copies of all their videos.

If you feel like chatting with others who also archive youtube content, consider stopping by my discord server: https://discord.gg/EJvS4kf

We maintain a list [1] of content that various members have archived, such that when content is removed from youtube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content.

It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived, and occasionally direct efforts to preserve specific content- like unlisted videos right now.

[1] https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w

Absolutely! Think of a channel getting wiped out for a fake copyright infringement and you could have dozens of videos (if not more) wiped out

This is what I use youtubedl for. I don't trust Google to keep stuff I'm interested in available forever.