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Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

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Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what the channel ID (UCID) was?

Unfortunately no, and attempting to go to https://www.youtube.com/account_advanced redirects the suspended account page.

You may be able to find it in your browser history. For example: youtube.com/channel/UC* or studio.youtube.com/channel/UC*

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#73
post #52
post #15

Lots of commenters rushing to chastise the user for not taking pro-active steps to preserve content, since your Google account (or any cloud account once a provider decides you've violated their Terms of Service) may go "poof". Wouldn't it be nice if the platforms themselves helped out with this, instead of luring their users into a false sense of security?

YouTube isn't a cloud storage service, let alone one a paid one. I'm not really sure what you'd expect them to do. If they lost access to their free Google drive I'd be more sympathetic.

No post body was provided.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#74

Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. At some point, fair credit reporting didn't exist and we decided to create that to regulate a different industry. Is there a real and lasting solution to this problem that the firm hand of democracy can…

This is similar to leaving your personal property contents in a storage locker / unit / container that you don't own. Except it being digital, and given the storage isn't / never was being paid for, you're going to get that much less sympathy from the judicial system - entirely appropriately. No, there's no legislative solution to something like this. The content owner has no standing and it's difficult to find an ar…

It should be treated like an easement.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#75

In 2021, there was an effort to archive older unlisted videos uploaded before 2017 before they were automatically made private [1]. It's fairly unlikely your videos were archived by this effort unless they were publicly linked somewhere, but you can still try to find them using a tool like: https://filmot.com/unlistedSearch or https://unlistedvideos.com/ . If you do find any of them on the list, you can try pull them…

If you do find any of them on the list, you can try pull them up from the Web Archive [2] and save them from there.

It's been over a decade since YT would simply allow you to download the video file directly (does anyone still remember the "s/watch?v=/get_video?video_id=/" trick?), probably for DRM reasons. Even if it did, I doubt the Internet Archive would have bothered to try archiving due to the immense volume that video takes.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#76

Mea Culpa I'm in the industry. I knew we should have had backups. She is brilliant but not technical and while the backups would have been expensive and difficult due to size, I should have built multiple NAS and distributed them geographically and used Syncthing to keep them updated. To be clear we were legacy G-suite users and have converted to paying customers, so it was a free service while this happened, and is…

If you're a paid G-Suite user, you might be able to get help that way. I'm pretty sure I have heard of others doing something like that.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#77
post #69
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would. I hope people here work towards their companies regularly warning their customers that any content stored on their services can be gone any day without any warning.

How about if durable archival was an upsell alongside upload?

I wonder how that would work, after certain amount of data or time period. For reasonable cost ship a tape archive or similar to customer?

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#78
FYI, before you chastise the OP for not backing up, please take a minute and think about the fact that this can happen with Gmail too. Have you backed up your email?

I think Google has the responsibility to make it VERY clear that you can lose access to your content without notice. I don't think users truly understand that now.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#79
I wasn't aware that unlisted videos could even receive copyright/bullying strikes, but it seems obvious now.

You could easily ruin someone's YouTube channel by finding unlisted videos through the rest of the Web and reporting them, like this poor couple have found out....

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