Manually downloading videos from YouTube is boring and time consuming.

Even if you own the channel, you need dozens of inputs to download a simple thumbnail from YouTube Studio.

Since I wanted an easy way to create yearly backups of my YT channel I came up with a script that does the job for me.

simple-yt-backup

simple-yt-backup it’s a Python script which downloads videos, thumbnails and descriptions from a YouTube channel.

• github.com/davcri/simple-yt-backup

The script itself is not doing much, all the credits should go to youtube-dl which abstracts all the hard work.

I created simple-yt-backup to have more control on the download process. One thing that I added is the automatic resume in case of failures like:

ERROR: unable to download video data: <urlopen error [Errno -2] Namer or service not known>

Future

The script could be easily extended. EG: it would be nice to automate the upload process to archive.org using their Python API.

Another nice thing would be adding support for CLI arguments, but it’s not a priority since I’ll use this script just a couple of times per year.

Also I would love to hear feedback by users to see how simple-yt-backup can be improved. Feel free to open an issue/PR on GitHub!

Hope that this script will be useful and/or inspiring. Let me know your opinions in the comment section or reach me out on Twitter.

Bye!