Back Up Your Own YouTube Channel to a Local Drive

Why back up your own YouTube channel?#

A YouTube channel backup is a local copy of every video you published, kept on a drive you control. YouTube is a publishing platform, not an archive: a lost account, a strike or a deleted video can take a video offline, and the old project drive may be long gone.

Editors reach for the backup in three situations: a client wants a recut of an old video whose project files are gone, a channel moves to a new owner or platform, or you want your back catalog as b-roll for a compilation.

YouTube re-encodes every upload, so any download is a copy of YouTube’s version, not your master file. A complete backup therefore has two layers: your own exports, if you still have them, and the published versions that YouTube serves today.

What are the options for downloading your own videos?#

Three routes download your own uploads: YouTube Studio, Google Takeout and a channel download in B-ROLL. YouTube Studio and Takeout are YouTube’s own tools for creators; B-ROLL is a free Windows app for editors that downloads the channel from its link.

The table compares the three routes on what each gives you, the quality and the effort, as of September 2026.

The Studio limits come from YouTube Help on downloading your uploads: Studio blocks the download for a removed video, a video with a copyright or Community Guidelines strike, or one that uses a preapproved audio track. Google Account Help covers the Takeout side: archives of up to 50 GB each, split into several when the data is larger, and each archive can be downloaded 5 times.

Downloading from YouTube is governed by its Terms of Service even when the videos are yours; the page on whether it is legal to download YouTube videos summarizes what the Terms say.

How do you back up a channel with B-ROLL?#

B-ROLL backs up a channel from one pasted link: switch on Download channels in Advanced options, paste the channel link and pick Download every video in the channel.

Channel downloads start on No, so the first paste of a channel link only shows the hint “Channel downloads are off: enable in Advanced.” Set Download channels to Ask to confirm each channel link, or Yes to open the channel downloader straight away. B-ROLL recognizes channel links in the youtube.com/@name, /channel/, /c/ and /user/ forms.

The Download from channel dialog offers three choices: Choose videos from a list (the latest 60 videos), the latest few videos, or Download every video in the channel. For a first backup take every video. More than 5 videos become one grouped card in the queue, and B-ROLL downloads one video at a time.

The files land in a subfolder named after the channel, inside the SAVE TO folder. Point SAVE TO at the backup drive before you paste, and every file of the run stays together. The YouTube playlist and channel downloader page covers the dialog, playlists and grouped cards in detail.

Credits files turn the folder into a manifest. With Save credits (attribution) for each download on, the default, each video gets a .credits.txt with its title, channel, video URL, upload date and license, and the same block is appended to one credits.txt for the folder. That record matters because each file’s modified date is the download date, not the upload date.

Which format should a YouTube channel archive use?#

A YouTube channel archive should use MP4 or MKV at Best quality. Those containers keep the streams YouTube serves without a second encode, so the archive is as close to YouTube’s version as a download gets and takes the least space.

As of September 2026, an MP4 from YouTube usually holds AV1 or VP9 video with Opus audio, not H.264 and AAC, because of yt-dlp’s default stream ranking. That is fine for an archive and a poor choice for a timeline. On Ema Zamboni’s own timeline in DaVinci Resolve, 4K60 AV1 footage from YouTube played back heavily and AV1 or VP9 downloads crashed Resolve at times, which is why B-ROLL converts to ProRes or DNxHR when you ask it to.

Convert when the re-edit starts, not for the archive. ProRes and DNx are a conversion after the download: B-ROLL picks the lightest tier that holds the source, the conversion uses every CPU core, and the .mov is many times larger than the MP4. The comparison of MOV vs MP4 vs MKV vs WEBM for video editing explains what each container holds.

With credits saving on, B-ROLL also embeds the title, uploader, date and URL inside MP4, MKV, WEBM and audio files. ProRes and DNx files do not get that embedded metadata, so their .credits.txt carries the record alone.

How do you check the channel backup is complete?#

Check a channel backup by counting: the number of video files in the channel subfolder should match the video count in YouTube Studio’s Content list. A gap means a video failed, is private or unlisted, or was skipped.

Start with the queue. A failed card shows the last error line from yt-dlp, and retry re-queues that video. Then count the blocks in the folder’s credits.txt, one per finished video, and compare the titles with Studio. A missing credits block with a present video file means the metadata lookup failed, which B-ROLL does not report as an error.

Play a few files to the end, one from each year of the channel: a broken file is cheaper to catch now than during a recut. Look for the videos Studio lists as private or unlisted in the Takeout archive, not the channel folder.

How often should you back up a YouTube channel?#

Back up a YouTube channel after every batch of new uploads, or at least once a month for a channel that publishes weekly. The first run is the long one; later runs only add the videos published since.

For the later runs, pick the latest few videos in the Download from channel dialog instead of the whole channel. A video with the same settings whose file still exists opens Already downloaded, and yt-dlp also skips a file that already exists, so an overlap does not fill the drive twice.

Google Takeout can repeat itself: its scheduled export creates an archive every 2 months for one year, starting immediately. Keep the Takeout archives and the B-ROLL folder on a drive outside your Google account, and keep a second copy in another place. For folder names and bins once the files are on disk, see how to organize downloaded YouTube clips in the guides to YouTube footage from download to timeline.

What goes wrong in a channel backup, and how do you fix it?#

The common channel backup problems are a channel link that queues nothing, videos that fail with a sign-in request, and a batch that stops partway. Each one has a fix in B-ROLL.

• Nothing happens after the paste. Download channels is still on No. Set it to Ask or Yes in Advanced options.
• “Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot”. As of September 2026, YouTube sometimes answers downloads with this message. The fix is a new cookies.txt, exported from a browser where you are signed in to your own YouTube account and loaded in B-ROLL. Cookies expire, so repeat the export whenever the message comes back. The steps are in YouTube cookies.txt: export, use and refresh it.
• Videos missing at the end. Deleted, private and region-blocked videos fail on their own cards. The playlist download that skips or stops page lists each cause with its fix.
• The drive fills up. A ProRes or DNx run converts every video. Switch the Format back to MP4 for the archive.