How to Easily Automate Archiving Your Favorite Youtube Channels, Right Now, Because Eventually They Will Go Poof! This tutorial is a process workflow that I use to back-up my favorite channels because I've seen entire channels disappear and if they don't have a website to mirror those videos, that information is lost until the owner re-uploads. I've seen that this destruction of people's life's work has a completely ruinous and toxic psychological impact on the deplatformed, and sometimes they take a long time--if ever--to get that information back up.  Therefore its up to you to archive their work, should you find it valuable. I have to thank James Corbett of Corbettreport.com for proposing this solution My tutorial uses a tool called youtube-dl, which is one of the best pieces of open source software I've come across.  It is extremely reliable Apologies in advance if this is too technical a workflow.  This is for intermediately skilled people having an understanding of advanced / developer features of browsers  Youtube-dl is a cross platform open source tool that can download videos from hundreds of sites.  But as the name implies, it was originally for downloading youtube videos.  It does this competently.  It's a commandline tool and I use it on linux but it can be used in windows and mac also. https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/index.html Bookmark whatever page you're on, name the bookmark "Get YT URLs bookmarklet 1" and "Get YT URLs Bookmarklet 2", or something else you prefer.  In the "URL" field, (or in FF "Location"), copy the contents of the bookmarklet code below into this field.  Copy the first code block for bookmarklet 1 and the 2nd for bookmarklet 2.  And when you use them, if one doesn't work on the video page, try the other.  I'm sure I could make the code better but is it worth the time?  'Bookmarklet Version 1' 'Bookmarklet Version 2' -- in case version 1 doesn't work.  YT makes arbitrary markup and uses its own very abnormal conventions by essentially ignoring html and going with its own version of xml. Can't do anything about it but work around it.  The only thing different from the above is the selector (contents vs primary). This applies only to youtube.  If you navigate to the videos page / tab of a youtube video channel, and scroll down to load more videos, you can then harvest the urls of these videos from the top of the list.   When you have the videos you want, or if you want all of them (which could be thousands) you may have to keep hitting pagedown to load them all. This is really the only time consuming step, and there are tools that can automate this by simulating a scrolldown in code, but it's really not so bad if you have a reasonably fast connection.  You'd have to have a prolific channel running for a decade for it to really be time-consuming, since youtube loads something like 25 at a time. Right click anywhere on the page and then select "Inspect", to bring up the developer tools.  This tutorial only works in brave / chrome / chromium.  It might work in firefox ('inspect element'), esp if you use a user-agent tool to spoof a chrome browser. Switch to the console tab and clear the error messages. ('clear errors' or trash can). Click one of the bookmarklets you made and select the number of videos you want.  If it doesn't work, use the other bookmarklet version.  If neither work, refresh and try again.  If that doesn't work, well, youtube has changed crap again, and maybe you can find a better 'CSS selector' and replace that selector with 'primary' in this line, and it will probably work again. Copy the output (a long list of urls) to a text file and then use that to automate your downloads by feeding the file into youtube-dl using the -a (from external file) flag like so If you want to throttle the downloads so it doesn't eat up your internet bandwidth, you can use the -r flag Again, apologies if this is too technical an approach.  It is a workflow, but it is extremely easy to do, especially after doing it once. 1) Youtube has this shitty thing they do which is age-restricting videos, which inhibits anonymous persons / non-logged-in persons from accessing the video.  They do this to suppress a video, and we know this because the content of some age-restricted videos violated no laws or community guidelines and did not address adult only content. Youtube simply didn't want people hearing what the video said.  There is currently no way around this age-restriction using youtube-dl 2) When in doubt or youtube-dl isn't working, try these two things A) update youtube-dl.  In windows I don't know how to do that. Probably re-download the latest version.   If you have DOS and have pip then you can use that.  In linux and mac you can use pip (python updater). Here are the commands, and it's helpful to upgrade pip itself first. B) if THAT doesn't work, delete any temporary youtube-dl download files (.PART files), and then clear the youtube-dl cache.  I use this script, which I call yt-clear or you could simply do Youtube can transcode to mp3 files if you want, but I usually use Audacity >> apply chains >> convert to mp3 for that because it normalizes volume and I've added filters to it to make the voice more pronounced.  This is beyond the scope of this tutorial but you can look up how to do it and there are many options. You can also change the flags on youtube-dl to download only the audio Good luck archiving.  I have over 4 TB of podcast mp3s and enjoy listening to them on long drives to visit parents and while gardening outdoors.