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. But I was still waiting for the email from Google, so I didn’t know what it would contain. I figured I could always just keep the videos I had downloaded–the videos that really were in my paul @ thurrott.com YouTube “channel” (I don’t use it) and the First Ring Daily videos I had downloaded with a third-party app. And then just download the remainder using that app too. Or something.

I was out with my wife at lunch yesterday and I checked my email. The new Takeout email had arrived. Gulp.

“We’re going to need a bigger boat,” I said, confusing my wife. Sometimes I forget people aren’t inside my head.

The email told me that the Takeout for the Thurrott.com YouTube channel consists of 1373 files, each of which is 2 GB.

1373 files. Each 2 GB in size.

That’s roughly 2750 GB, or almost 3 TB of data. (Not really, as I later discovered, looking at each file size. But close enough.) That is astronomically higher than the size of the videos I’ve downloaded so far. The First Ring Daily videos are about 271 GB, and the videos I now know to be from my personal account are about 94.5 GB. So about 366 GB. I’m not even close.

In fact, I’m so far off I can’t effectively do this work on the laptops I have with me here in Mexico. The Surface Laptop 7 I’m using to write this–which also has my previous Takeout downloads–has a 1 TB SSD, which is fine for most use cases. And I do have at least one laptop here with a 2 TB disk, which is even better. I also have a few external SSDs, but the bigger of the two is 2 TB and is mostly full.

Well, crap.

Just downloading 1373 files, which you have to do manually, one click at a time, will be tedious. I just started doing so, using the laptop with the 2 TB drive. I suspect I will need to split that between at least two laptops, however. So that will be fun. Consolidating them will be … well, impossible. I need a bigger boat. Or, disk. Or something.

I wrote earlier today about the NAS I will soon purchase. But that won’t be soon enough for this work. And that means I may need to just get an external hard drive of some kind for now. I need a place to store all this. But I’m also in Mexico, where electronics are more expensive and … ugh. Ah well.

So I have a new plan. Well, it’s the same plan. But adjusted for the additional storage requirements.

First, I halted the downloads and requested a new Google Takeout of the Thurrott.com YouTube data. This time, instead of 2 GB files, I will get it in 50 GB files, the largest option Google offers. (Did I write “tedious” above in describing manually downloading 1373 files? The correct term is “impossible.”) So that will happen tomorrow, most likely.

Second, I ordered an external hard drive to store and manage this download. It’s the only way that makes sense.

I started with a 5 TB WD My Passport Ultra, which costs $145 in the U.S. and MEX$3948 here in Mexico (both at Amazon), which works out to almost $200 in U.S. dollars, driving home my point above about electronics being more expensive here. Our kids will arrive here in two weeks, so I could have shipped it to one of them and had them bring it here. But I want to get going on this sooner rather than later. I was going to just suck it up and order it from Amazon Mexico. But then it occurred to me there might be a cheaper option.

There was a 5 TB Seagate Disco drive for just MEX$2613 on sale, normally MEX$3280, or about $128 U.S. But that wouldn’t arrive until March. And then I found a 4 TB Toshiba Canvio Basics drive for even less, MEX$2040 (also on sale, normally MEX$2149), or about $100 U.S. I ordered it, and it will arrive on Friday. You gotta love Amazon.com. (BTW, if I bought the same drive from Amazon in the US, the cost is $95, so this is a rare example of a sale-priced electronics item being roughly identical in cost while on sale.)

Nothing is ever easy. But as noted previously, I will figure this out one way or the other.

More soon.