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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/stilljustacatinacage on 2024-11-02 19:33:47+00:00.

Came in way “under budget” on the storage footprint from what I was anticipating. I was always putting this off because I didn’t want to spend 1-2 TB of storage on it, so I thought I’d swing by just to say that if there’s anyone else on the fence about backing up their favorite Youtube content, it isn’t as burdensome as you - if you’re like me - might think it is.

Just grab yt-dlp, punch in the URL, something like:

yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/[username]/videos

… and away it goes. You’ll want to do this from inside its own folder; it downloads all the videos to the active directory. I didn’t bother with much customization, the defaults all work out well enough for me.

I did use Bulk Rename Utility after the fact, to prefix the filenames with the upload date, eg:

 [2021-11-02] Video Name

yt-dlp writes the upload date as the “modified date”, so it was simple enough using BRU. I looked briefly, and it looks like there is a way to get yt-dlp to write the upload date itself, but it can’t be done after-the-fact and I was already 300 videos deep by the time I thought of it. BRU is easy to understand and worked a treat.

Anyway, that’s all. I’m obviously preaching to the choir, but even though I consider myself a somewhat experienced hoarder, I thought this little PSA could be useful if there are any others out there like myself.

Okay bye.