Online Accounts 2025: More YouTube Video Downloads (Premium)

For all the complaints one might lob at the company, deserved or not, Google Takeout is an incredible tool for reclaiming your data.

Until it isn’t.

Yesterday, I described the first step in what will be a months-long process to deemphasize my use of Big Tech online services and accounts. I’m not going to stop using things like OneDrive and Google Drive, they’re useful. But I also don’t want my most crucial data to be isolated in services controlled by companies that don’t care about me or my business. And the reason I don’t want that is that I was almost victimized by this relationship. That’s how religion works: You get it when something goes wrong.

In my case, what went wrong was Google locking me–and Brad–out of the Thurrott.com YouTube channel for reasons that still escape me. And then providing with absolutely zero support while, in the process, threatening me with data loss. Thanks, Google. Wake-up call received.

Before taking the aforementioned first step, I had to come up with a plan. This will likely evolve over time, and to be fair to myself, I took steps earlier to ensure that most of my personal and work data is at least replicated in multiple places to avoid data loss. But as the YouTube escapade proved, I missed a few things So I’m making adjustments.

? The initial YouTube download

Anyway, that first step was obvious enough: I didn’t have a backup of the videos in the Thurrott.com YouTube channel, mostly because it never occurred to me that I would ever need such a thing. So it was time to get that content out of YouTube. For now, I will simply store it on a couple of laptops that I have with me here in Mexico (we’re here through the end of April). But once we get back home, I’ll buy a couple of NAS (network attached storage) devices and get that properly backed up. Or archived. Or whatever term you prefer.

As noted up top, Google Takeout is pretty impressive. I had used this service previously during my photo collection consolidation work in late 2023 and early 2024, and so I knew what to expect.

Except that I didn’t. As it turns out, YouTube is unique from other Google services. And it’s not entirely clear why.

The most obvious weirdism is that Google commingles YouTube and YouTube Music into a single Takeout category. You can cherry-pick major content categories–for example, you can toggle “music-uploads” and “videos” independently–but a lot of the data, including things like playlists, is combined. But I ended up just downloading the entire thing, knowing I could sort through it later.

? That’s not all, folks

But there’s a bigger issue, at least for me. I have three YouTube channels associated with my primary Google (Workspace) account, paul @ thurrott.com. One is the primary channel, I guess, which I don’t use for anything. (Though I do use it with YouTube Music.) And the other two are the Thurrott.com and Eternal Spring channels. The interaction between these things is unclear to me, but I assumed that me downloading all my YouTube/YouTube Music content would, I don’t know, download all my YouTube/YouTube Music content.

That is not what happened.

As I wrote yesterday, and looking just at the videos, what I got from Takeout was all the YouTube videos that I had uploaded to the Thurrott.com channel. Which is not all the videos that I own. It didn’t include the Eternal Spring videos. And it didn’t include any of the First Ring Daily videos on the Thurrott.com channel that Brad uploaded.

Think about that for a second. To upload videos to Thurrott.com, I have to switch from paul @thurrott.com to Thurrott.com in the YouTube “account” switcher. To upload videos to Eternal Spring, I have to switch to the Eternal Spring “account.” Neither of these things is an account, however. Both (Thurrott.com and Eternal Spring) are, instead, what Google calls brand accounts. They are linked (or “connected,” Google uses both terms) to an actual account, in this case paul @ thurrott.com. Each is, in Google’s words, “a different name than the one you use on your Google Account.”

A Google account is linked to a single person. But a brand account can be shared across multiple Google accounts. Anyone with a Google account that’s linked to a YouTube brand account can manage that brand account without signing out, that’s what the account switcher on YouTube does, and I use it pretty frequently. (Often joking internally about having multiple personality disorder because mental health is hilarious. No, not really.)

Without getting too far into the weeds here, I have been the Owner of the Thurrott.com YouTube channel/brand since I took over the site two years ago. Brad is what’s called a Manager. Among other things, this lets him upload videos like First Ring Daily.

So. I signed in to Google Takeout. I initiated a download of all YouTube/YouTube Music content. What I got is…

• The videos I uploaded to Thurrott.com, but only the archived videos I mass uploaded

And that’s it. What I did not get was …

• The videos Brad I uploaded to Thurrott.com
• The videos I uploaded to Eternal Spring
• The more recent videos I uploaded to Thurrott.com

Um. What.

? Brand accounts are not accounts and vice versa

I can’t explain this exactly, but looking at Google Takeout this morning, I think I may (sort of) know what I could do to fix this. As it turns out, the account switcher that I associate exclusively with YouTube, is, in fact, available on Google Takeout too. I’ve never seen–or at least noticed–this anywhere else. For example, if I visit Gmail, Google Maps, or Google Search, the account switcher at each doesn’t offer me the Thurrott.com and Eternal Spring options I see at YouTube. But … Google Takeout does. Interesting.

In researching this, I found a Google Support document with the following information.

“You can use certain services with [a brand account], like YouTube, to create an online presence … You can use certain services with your account, like Google Photos or YouTube. You’ll be able to communicate, connect, and share info with customers and fans with your Brand Account.”

Huh. Sure enough, if I sign in to Google Photos with paul @ thurrott.com, I get Thurrott.com and Eternal Spring choices in the account switcher too. I had never seen/noticed that, but perhaps the full list of Google services that supports brand accounts is YouTube, Google Photos, and Google Takeout.

Anyway. I still can’t explain why I got only some of the videos I uploaded to YouTube when I used Google Takeout as paul @ thurrott.com. But I did. I assume if I switch to Thurrott.com at Google Takeout and initiate a download of YouTube content, that I will get the videos Brad uploaded as well as the other videos I’ve uploaded. And that if I switch to Eternal Spring at Google Takeout, I will get those videos.

How stupid is this? As the owner of all that content, I should either just get it all or be offered choices. But instead, Google has this fragile system, this house of cards, of intertwined Google and brand accounts. That do not work logically, from what I can tell.

? Whatever, just get it done

No matter. As I wrote this, I switched to the Thurrott.com brand account at Google Takeout and initiated a download of all associated YouTube and YouTube Music content. I’m curious if that will include all the content in the channel, meaning all the videos that Brad and I uploaded.

Before I figured this out, however, I decided to research ways to download the First Ring Daily videos otherwise. (At the time, I thought these were the only missing videos.) I have used tools like YouTube Video Downloader to download YouTube videos for many years, but I was looking for something more automated. And I found it, though I am a bit surprised that you can even do this. There’s a tool called 4K Video Downloader Plus that can not only download videos from YouTube (and other services), but it can download entire channels (WTF!), search results, or … wait for it … playlists. Because all the First Ring Daily episodes are in a playlist, that means that I could use this tool to just download those videos in an automated fashion.

So I tried it. The free version of 4K Video Downloader Plus is limited to 10 video downloads per day, so I pointed it at the First Ring Daily playlist, and it downloaded 10 videos. Satisfied with that, I purchased the Pro version of this tool for $45–this supports up to 7 simultaneous downloads and permits commercial use–and set it loose. It downloaded almost all the videos in the playlist–over 1400 of them–before we left for dinner last night.

I say almost there because there were 42 videos it could not download. I can’t explain this, beyond trying each manually in the app and just getting an error message.

This morning, I installed the YouTube Video Downloader I’ve been using for over a decade and used that to get the other 42 videos. This wasn’t too hard: I could copy each non-downloaded video URL to the clipboard using 4K Video Downloader and YouTube Video Downloader would pick up the URL automatically. Then, I just added each to its download queue in turn.

Within an hour, I had the rest of the videos downloaded.

I will still download the new Takeout and see what’s there and if there are videos the other downloads missed. I think there are. (I’m sure there are.) But what I have so far are 310 videos I had uploaded that take up 94.5 GB of disk space and then about 1450 First Ring Daily videos that take up about 275 GB. So less than 400 GB total. So far, but there are likely several or a few dozen other videos too. I’m curious where it ends up.

In short, Google makes this really difficult and non-obvious. It’s almost like healthcare or taxes. But whatever. I will figure this out one way or the other.

More soon.