Backing up a YouTube channel

[Mr Chris]

It occurred to me recently that, while I've kept the originals of all the actual videos on my YouTube channel, I don't have offline backups of the descriptions, tags, and some custom thumbnails. Can anyone recommend a handy little tool that will let me download all of these in one go, or is it a case of going through each of them one by one and copying and pasting whatever's required? I'm really not keen on the latter, as we're talking about over 200 uploads!

I don't know whether this is the right place to ask this, but perhaps someone round these parts has been in the same boat. I stress that this is my own YouTube account, which may (hopefully) make things more straightforward.

[ron spencer]

Where are your originals? You do know that when you uploaded them originally YouTube transcoded them right? There are many free tools to download them, but what you download will not be the same as what you uploaded.

[poisondeathray]

Where are your originals? You do know that when you uploaded them originally YouTube transcoded them right? There are many free tools to download them, but what you download will not be the same as what you uploaded.

Actually you can get the originals on your own account , with Google Takeout. The original upload is downloaded as an archive. So all 200 could be downloaded as a big zip file in 1 go

However, it sounds like he's asking for other stuff like thumbs, data entries. Last time I checked, it didn't include those. But it might have changed

[Mr Chris]

However, it sounds like he's asking for other stuff like thumbs, data entries. Last time I checked, it didn't include those. But it might have changed

Yes, it's particularly the descriptions I'm after, as some of those contain details and links that would take an eternity to find again. The tags would be nice to have backups of as well, but less essential. I'll go the copy-and-paste route if I have to, but am I really asking something for which there isn't some sort of simple (preferably free) solution? I find that difficult to believe...

[johnruiz]

I use "Internet Download Manager". It has the options to download any quality. Up to 4K ( highest quality ).

[manono]

Once again, he's not interested in the videos themselves but the video information, tags and thumbnails. And, like pdr, I know of no way of retrieving all that information except one-by-one. On the other hand, along with the videos I've kept my video information and thumbnails (but not tags).

[johnmeyer]

There are quite a few tools for downloading all pages of a web site. You can certainly use one of those. To use, you specify the root URL which, in your case, will be your main page on YouTube, something like

https://www.youtube.com/user/johnmeyer77

You then press a button and it crawls all pages pointed to by that URL. Pretty simple stuff. Just use Google and you'll come up with half a dozen choices. The ones I've used let you ignore videos and other large files (which is what you want to do) so that the operation happens quickly, and the resulting HTML, XML and other files take up very little space, since they're just text.

[ron spencer]

Where are your originals? You do know that when you uploaded them originally YouTube transcoded them right? There are many free tools to download them, but what you download will not be the same as what you uploaded.

Actually you can get the originals on your own account , with Google Takeout. The original upload is downloaded as an archive. So all 200 could be downloaded as a big zip file in 1 go

However, it sounds like he's asking for other stuff like thumbs, data entries. Last time I checked, it didn't include those. But it might have changed

I never knew that! So google keeps the original and transcodes what it needs to youtube?

[1957classic]

youtube-dl will download your thumbnails and descriptions, if that's what you want.