Online Accounts 2025: A Little Math (Premium)

I wasn't expecting to write so much about getting my YouTube videos out of the service, but I encountered a few issues. Now that it's in a good place, it's intersecting with another part of this project, the NAS and how much storage I'll need when I put that together.

First things first.
Initial YouTube backup
Without belaboring the point--this has already taken up too much of my time, and your time--the short version of the work I've done to back up my YouTube videos so far included:

Getting a Google Takeout that I later learned was from my personal (and unused) YouTube channel and not from the Thurrott.com brand account.
Figuring out a way to automatically download all the First Ring Daily videos from the Thurrott.com YouTuber channel when I thought that was most of what was missing.
And then finally figuring out my error and triggering two different Google Takeout downloads after the first consisted of 1373 ZIP file, each about 2 GB in size. I also ordered a portable USB hard drive to temporarily store this data ahead of getting a NAS.

For my second Google Takeout (third, if you count the mistake at the beginning), I requested 50 GB files, which is the largest file size Google offers. Later that day, the email arrived, and I discovered this would require 64 file downloads. That's about 3.2 TB of disk space, total, assuming each file is exactly 50 GB.

Google Takeout is a wonderful tool--I wish Microsoft offered something like this--but it can be tedious dealing with the downloads. You can only download these files with a web browser. You have to click a link for each download manually, in turn. (I use Ctrl + click because it would otherwise refresh the download list and you lose your place). And then you're at the mercy of the browser and whatever quality and downloading issues it brings to the table. I connected the laptop to the router with an Ethernet cable for the best results and hoped for the best.

Unfortunately, I started this process with Edge, but it was horribly unreliable. Because of the file sizes, I figured I would try 10 at a time, and after kicking off 10 downloads and configuring PowerToys Awake to keep the PC alive for the duration, I went off and worked on a different PC. But when I checked back in, all the downloads had stopped. So I restarted each--that, at least, worked fine in that they continued rather than started over--and then babysat the downloads until they were done. This process took about three hours. I left it to run overnight, but all those downloads crapped out as well.

With that lesson firmly in place, I moved to Chrome, which proved to be more reliable, though I did later experience a few download quirks. Sadly, it wasn't any quicker either.

I ordered the external hard drive on Wednesday, and Amazon said it would arrive on Friday. Wednesday evening, I predicted to my wife that the drive would arrive before I had downloaded all the files. And then I set out to try to prove...