Late last month, Google quietly unveiled a new feature of their Google Takeout service: the ability to archive and download all of your YouTube uploads in their original uploaded format. Prior to this, the only way you could retrieve videos from your YouTube Channel was to download an .mp4 – a compressed version of your original upload. Unfortunately, you had to download each video individually and are limited to two downloads every two hours.
With the addition of YouTube to the Google Takeout services menu, you can now archive and download a zip file of all your videos (or some of your choosing) in their original format with just a few clicks. This is a great way to back up your videos, or recover files that you might have lost locally that remain on YouTube. Even if you cloud archive and choose not to download locally, you can rest assured that your files are backed-up beyond just YouTube.
Here are the simple and easy steps to download your YouTube library:
1) Visit https://www.google.com/takeout/#custom:youtube. Google will analyze your YouTube Channel and estimate the space required for the download.
2) When the display hits 100%, click “Download Archive.”
3) Google will crunch all of your videos. Completion time may vary based on the size of your library.
4) When complete, click the “Downloads” tab to see a list of all of your archived videos. You may download at will!
One nice feature of Google Takeout is the ability to archive data from your other Google profiles, like Picasa or Docs.
Even if you don’t want to re-download all of your videos, there’s no reason not to go ahead and archive them through Google Takeout. What are you waiting for?
About Steven Shattuck
[...] To Deal: First, archive all of your video files using Google Takeout. Next, manually archive your video titles, descriptions and keyword [...]