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...