Member Avatar for canadafred

I deleted all my video a few years back and now need examples of my music video creation skills. I've tried several ways to get the videos back but I cannot even find their Youtube locators. Thanks for your time.

Edited by canadafred because: poor spelling
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  • Latest Post Latest Post by happygeek

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Building on 's tip and 's reality check: once a YouTube video is deleted, getting it back from YouTube is basically a non-starter. Your best bet is to reconstruct the old watch URLs and then hunt for traces (embeds, mirrors, thumbnails, analytics pages) that survived elsewhere. Here is a workflow that has worked for clients in this situation.

Start with your channel, not individual videos. If you still have the channel ID (it starts with UC...), derive the uploads playlist by swapping UC -> UU, then open it in the Wayback Machine.

uploads = channelId.replace(/^UC/, 'UU')

Then check snapshots of:

  • any old youtube.com/c/ or youtube.com/user/ vanity URLs

Old playlist pages often list titles with full watch?v= IDs even when playback is gone. Use those IDs to search the web for reuploads or embeds. If you recover an ID, fetch its thumbnail at https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VIDEOID/hqdefault.jpg and reverse-image-search it.

Mine your own breadcrumbs:

  • Search your email for youtube.com/watch or youtu.be.
  • On Twitter/X: from:YourHandle filter:links (youtube.com OR youtu.be) scoped to the years you posted.
  • Look up your channel on analytics sites like SocialBlade and open their archived snapshots in the Wayback Machine; they often list video IDs and dates.

If nothing turns up, rebuild the portfolio: cut a short reel from any surviving drafts, screen-capture NLE timelines to show techniques, and add brief project notes. Not perfect, but it convincingly proves capability when the originals are gone.

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Member Avatar for cereal

Hi,

if you ever shared the videos on Twitter then check the Archive.org:

Sincerly, I had difficult to find valid data in those copies but I'm probably doing something wrong. Ask to the archivists, maybe they can help you.

Edited by cereal
Member Avatar for happygeek

To be honest, I think you are screwed Fred. Deletions from YouTube are overwritten pretty regularly, and pretty quickly. Attempts to recover (even with all the account details and video URLs etc) after more than a few days are doomed to fail. Certainly when you get into 'deleted years ago' territory there is more chance of Trump saying something sensible than you finding your videos. As Cereal says, if you (or someone else) shared them somewhere then there's a chance it will have got archived. However, there's a big difference between your data being archived somewhere and actually finding it; especially when you have precious little information to go on. But then I think you, sadly, know that...

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