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I have playlists on Youtube where I group interesting videos, mostly music.

However I've noticed that many YT videos have a rather short lifespan. After several weeks they are either deleted, made private, or the owner's account is suspended and thus the videos are removed.

For the videos that were deleted I can sometimes see a part of the title. But for videos made private I can see nothing.

Is there a tool available somewhere that can automatically track my playlists, do the snapshots so I can at least recover the title when the video is removed? (ideally it should run in the web, without the need for me to install anything).

I could probably write a script for doing this using YouTube API, but then issue is I'd need to schedule the fetches myself. Maybe someone already did some webapp for this?

Edit 2023: another option: https://findyoutubevideo.thetechrobo.ca/

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  • I tried all suggested options of few videos I see in my 3D printing playlists that have been removed, and so far none of the suggested methods works. Web archive works only around 1 in 10 times, others fail 100% of the time.
    – valentt
    Commented Mar 11, 2021 at 19:26

4 Answers 4

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The only way (2019) seems to copy the youtube video raw-url ,i.e.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwFWhqKx42f

and...

1) try that into google or bing search
2) if that doesnt help, search with only id (i.e. qwFWhqKx42f)

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Low-throughput solution, but works if something has been already lost. History contains 'Manage all activity' button. There you can find out dates, when you first watched/searched for video that was added before and after the video under consideration that became private/deleted. Thus the video under consideration was added to playlist in between known dates. Analyze watch history and find what this video is, because watch history saves all videos with thumbnails. As far as I know YouTube doesn't offer any better option.

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  • 1
    A very low throughput solution indeed, but an interesting one :) Welcome to StackExchange!
    – jakub.g
    Commented Dec 10, 2019 at 9:32
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archive.is and archive.org both allow you to take snapshots of pages, the .is page has a link you can use to capture a page each time the link is opened:

http://archive.is/?run=1&url=<yourURL>

You do still have to schedule this yourself though.

Also, you sometimes can find the metadata of a deleted video simply by googling the video's ID: there are plenty of YouTube download sites that simply copy all of the metadata of as many videos as they can get their hands on in the hopes of ranking higher.

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I came across this service which claims to do exactly what I asked for:

https://youtuberecover.com/

Unfortunately on several videos I tried it didn't have the metadata. But perhaps someone else will be more lucky than me with their videos.

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  • this one actually worked for me. it was a very popular video that was made private.
    – Awakened
    Commented Oct 10, 2020 at 5:13
  • Web site is not operational any more.
    – valentt
    Commented Mar 11, 2021 at 19:23
  • Its back online as of 2021.05.25.
    – uLoop
    Commented May 25, 2021 at 16:57
  • Gone again as of 2024-09-13
    – Gecko
    Commented Sep 13 at 11:35

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