ChannelBackup-Desktop is a free, open-source Python app that archives your videos, metadata, playlists, thumbnails, and comments to your own hard drive — no cloud, no account, no subscription.
YouTube owns your content in the most practical sense that matters: they can take it down, restrict it, demonetize it, or lose it — and you have no recourse if you don't have your own copy. Channels get banned for terms of service violations they didn't commit. Copyright bots strike valid videos. Entire catalogs disappear when accounts lapse.
Your channel is not backed up by default. YouTube does not automatically provide creators with downloadable backups of their video files. If your channel is terminated, suspended, or the files are otherwise lost, you cannot recover them from YouTube without having previously downloaded them yourself.
The solution is simple: keep a local copy — on your own hard drive, under your control. ChannelBackup-Desktop automates that.
Connect your channel once, and ChannelBackup-Desktop archives everything to a folder you choose, organized by video:
And your data stays local. There is no cloud component, no server that receives a copy of your content — the files land on your machine, in a folder you specify. Store them on an external drive, a NAS, or a cloud service of your own choosing; you control the destination.
ChannelBackup-Desktop is a Python script that runs on both Windows and Mac. Grab the source and follow the setup instructions in the README:
Source and documentation: github.com/VAROIndustries/ChannelBackup-Desktop
Prefer not to run a Python script yourself? The hosted service at channelbackup.app is the no-setup alternative — this open-source desktop script is the app behind it. (The channelbackup.app website itself is not open source.)