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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

#81

Post by userbinator »

rco8786 wrote: post #16
smoldesu wrote: post #2

> youtube deleted 700 videos created for internal training for our company I don't mean to be an asshole, but nobody guarantees you that your videos will stay up perpetually on YouTube. Especially if you've got hundreds of private or unlisted videos, it doesn't particularly surprise me that YouTube would pull them down, even if only for petty reasons. If you've been following the state of their website over the past…

> "the cloud" isn't a panacea for your storage needs. Except that is exactly how cloud companies market themselves. That is exactly what cloud companies have been telling consumers for a decade+. Right up to the point of commercials showing someone lose a device and saying “no worries, it’s all in the cloud!”, etc. We’ve been told for years that our data is safer in the cloud than it is on our own devices. That the c…

The more cynical among us never believed their lies and knew things like this would happen. I hope normal people also start realising that they were being fed marketing BS all along, and no doubt the more things like this happen, the sooner they will.

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

#83

Post by zanethomas »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #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.

I use protonmail for email I care about.

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

#84

Post by kilroy123 »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #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.

Yes. I started to back up all my gmail emails, years ago, after reading about such horror stories.

Eventually, I just switched to fastmail and gave up Google altogether.

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

#85

Post by smt88 »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #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.

I have been backing up my email since I was a young teenager.

These days, I grab my Google Takeout every year or so and also have a Fastmail account that pulls in every other email I receive.

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

#86

Post by rectang »

Ekaros wrote: post #77
rectang wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For most services (certainly for Google) the cost of long-term storage isn't the main issue — it's the cost of supporting an appeals process when you have to deal with bad actors and legal complexities. We have to overcome the economics and legalities and make it feasible to provide download of the archived materials even after an account gets banned.

Brainstorming an interface, I can imaging "archive your original source materials" as an upsell alongside the YouTube upload, with an option to archive the actual video file as well. This would actually be enabled if you were to subscribe to the archival service, which would be paid in advance. Perhaps we can argue that such files should be considered private materials rather than redistributed works, so not subject to copyright takedowns.

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

#87

Post by fouc »

Aunche wrote: post #52
rectang wrote: 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.

It kind of is. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, then we can effectively treat it like a duck, even if it denies it in the legalese.

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

#88

Post by iforgotpassword »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #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.

I agree. People quickly jump to "you're not paying for it so what did you expect" but without a warning in big red letters saying "we could fuck you over any day" this has the same vibe as a drug dealer giving you you first hit for free.

I lost access to my Yahoo mail address from teenage days and consecutively the YouTube account associated with it. The videos are still up and it's just random shenanigans, but still. Learned my lesson with big tech companies.

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

#89

Post by tech234a »

userbinator wrote: post #75
tech234a wrote: post #34

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 tha…

From what I understand, the Internet Archive does store some YouTube videos using a special setup, for an example archived video with working playback see: http://web.archive.org/web/20210716000952/https://www.youtub.... The files can be downloaded from the archive using https://web.archive.org/web/2oe_/http://wayback-fakeurl.arch....

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

#90

Post by ocdtrekkie »

rectang wrote: post #69
Ekaros wrote: 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?

So the issue is Google often takes down accounts with illegal content using the same process as here. Imagine the very real scenario that Google found CSAM on an account: They aren't going to let you access it or download it again for any amount of money.

And that's the problem here: With no humans in the process, YouTube treats ordinary users and predators exactly the same way, because ultimately, algorithms are stupid and don't make good moderators.

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