Today, we will talk about the technique that allows you to recover Youtube videos that were deleted, made private, or simply blocked by Youtube itself. With this trick, most of the time you would do just that. As it is possible, we will explain it in this article. Let’s get into it.
If you forgot the name of the video…
Everyone knows what YouTube is – an interesting social media platform where people can share anything through video-based content. And many love it, as we do. So much so that we sometimes use it as the alternative to TV. YouTube’s popularity seems to be growing. The things people watch are very broad, and many of us have our favorite channels. We subscribe to many channels, watch educational videos, funny pictures, guides, or music videos.
We can even use Youtube to show our movies to the world to make us famous, but we can upload our images to Youtube servers to create a backup space. Many of us make a very large list of videos in our collection. If you were predicting where we are going, you have a pointless point. Yes, you may have a carefully crafted playlist on YouTube, but those videos are not in your possession, i.e. the author or YouTube can revoke them, delete them, block them, etc.
If one or more videos have been removed from your playlist…
This message could be taken by many people very seriously and personally. How are you supposed to remember every video you added to a playlist years ago?
It’s incredibly frustrating and disappointing if the video you love or the one you watch over and over again suddenly disappears. Even more so if you don’t know which video you had on your playlist, for those completists, people with OCD, and the author of this article.
Fortunately, there are ways to find out the title of a deleted YouTube video. With the title or the name of the video, you can find another, similar, in the case of a music video, for example.
Why does Youtube delete videos?
- There are multiple reasons why Youtube videos are not available.
- The owner simply deletes the video. When the YouTubers need to re-upload, to make corrections for example.
- The owner makes the video private. Private videos are only available to people the owner specifies. Owners usually make the video private if they do not want it to be viewed publicly and do not want to delete it.
- The channel ceases to exist. If the owner deletes the channel or their account, or the channel was terminated due to violation of YouTube rules, all videos will also disappear.
- The video contains inappropriate or illegal content. Youtube will remove the video if it is violating Youtube’s terms of service.
- The video has a copyright claim. If there is a claim process due to copyrighted content, it may happen that the video will be blocked until the situation is resolved.
How to view deleted or private Youtube videos?
As you can notice, when you try to play the deleted video, Youtube doesn’t give you any direct information about what the video was, the title, the thumbnail, nor the channel name, nothing could help you to identify it.
When you haven’t found anything, if you retrieved the name or title of the video in the last step, well you can still Google it to see what comes up.
If there’s still nothing, let’s take it a step further and use the following way to retrieve it. It may not always work, but it’s worth a try and you’ll also learn more about the Internet and it can be useful not only with YouTube videos but other things as well.
Internet Archive
Let me introduce you to the Internet Archive organization, a non-profit library of free books, movies, software, music, websites, basically the Internet as we know it is content created by people.
When you have found nothing, if you retrieved the name or title of the video in the last step, well you can still google it to see what comes up.
If there is still nothing, let’s step up and use the next way to recover it. It may not always work, but it’s worth trying and you also will learn more about the internet and it actually may come in handy not only with Youtube videos but also with other stuff.
What this glorious site does is that it takes snapshots of websites to your digital archive so that they can be viewed much later in the future, and yes, it offers free access to all of it.
It means you can see the pages as they looked at a certain point in the past.
From there you can access a deleted YouTube video in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
However, it does not guarantee success, it may happen that Wayback Machine has not archived that URL or Archive.org does not have the actual video saved, so you will not be able to see it. But as long as the page with the video is archived, you will be able to see the title, channel, upload date, and even the description.
Also, over time, there is a greater chance that the Internet Archive crawler will find the YouTube page you are looking for and the video will be archived, videos that were deleted quickly probably didn’t have time to be archived in the first place.
Type https://archive.org/ in your browser.
WayBackMachine
Here you would need the address of the original Youtube video again in the search field, as we explained before, without & and without anything behind it.
Paste the URL of your video into the search bar near the WayBackMachine tag and press enter.
After that Archive.org will search for the data in the servers and databases, so you have to wait a bit (give it a couple of minutes).
The upload history of the deleted video will be organized in the form of a calendar.
Click on one of the dates to see if you can play the video or not. If one doesn’t work, keep clicking on other dates until you find the one you can run. The oldest date in the range of years may be the correct choice.
Conclusion
And there you have it. Hopefully, this guide will help someone when the video you loved you need to watch one more time.
There is no way to avoid losing videos you don’t own on YouTube since you don’t own them and you can’t stop a channel from deleting its videos.
If you don’t want to lose the video, you can try a video download bar converter to convert a video to MP4 directly and save it to your hard drive to be safe. Or in case the video was yours, remember about the backup in the future.
