Online Accounts 2025: We’re Going to Need a Bigger Boat (Premium)

I thought I was done with the YouTube drama, but as is so often the case, I made a critical error. So once more unto the breach. Or something.

A quick recap.

Thanks to the YouTube support issue I'm sure everyone has already heard about too much, I requested a Google Takeout of my YouTube data so I could at least have an offline copy on a laptop or whatever until I move to a new set of NAS devices later this year. But after downloading and un-archiving the Takeout, I discovered that it had only a portion of the videos I published to the Thurrott.com channel on YouTube. This was confusing to me at the time, and it required some research into Google brand accounts, and how they differ from "real" Google accounts. And I got starting making up the difference by purchasing a third-party utility that I used to download all the First Ring Daily videos.

That was where I left things the last time we discussed this topic. After that, I wanted to show my wife one of the weirder issues with this brand account system, that one could switch between "real" Google accounts and brand accounts on only some tiny subset of Google services (YouTube, Google Photos, and Takeout). And in queuing up that little demo, I realized the mistake I'd made.

In Online Accounts 2025: More YouTube Video Downloads (Premium), I noted that I had triggered the Google Takeout download of my YouTube content via my main online identity, paul @ thurrott.com, which is a Google (Workspace) account. (A "real" Google account, to keep that conventional going.) I had expected to get all the YouTube content associated with this account. But I only got the previously archived industry videos I had uploaded there as part of my Digital Decluttering work. And not the First Ring Daily videos. And some other videos. And ...

Oh, f#$k me.

As I switched between the online identities that YouTube supports--my paul @ thurrott.com account, which is dormant, Thurrott.com and Eternal Spring--to show my wife this silliness, I saw it. Saw what I had done. Or, not done. I guess. The videos I had downloaded with Google Takeout are what's still in my dormant paul @ thurrott.com account. They're all marked as private, because I don't want anyone watching them there, I want them watching the videos on Thurrott.com. At some point, I had downloaded them and re-uploaded them to Thurrott.com. But I never removed them from my personal YouTube account.

So that made sense, retroactively. Here I was complaining that Google hadn't given me all my videos. But I had signed in to Takeout using paul @ thurrott.com, not using the Thurrott.com brand account. (Again, only one of three Google services that even supports this.) As I was writing that previous article, I signed in to Takeout and switched to the Thurrott.com brand account and ordered another YouTube download. "I’m curious if that will include all the content in the channel, meaning all the videos that Brad and I uploaded," I wrote at the time...