Now, while I don't have Hyperthymesia I did have something called TubeBuddy. If you're not sure what that is, it's basically a browser extension that you can install which offers a variety of different tools for helping you manage your YouTube channel. I had it installed for a little while on my original ASMR channel.

One of the features that TubeBuddy provides is the ability to 'backup' your YouTube videos, and I put that in quotes as it sadly only backs up the metadata (title, description, tags, etc.) of your videos as a CSV, not the actual video files themselves. 😢

Sometime in December 2021 I suddenly remembered this and could also recall that I did perform a backup at some point. I then quickly went to see if I could still log in via the TubeBuddy website and sure enough I could (just because YouTube removed my data doesn't mean that any external services did or had to, which is why you can still find my channel and associated analytics on SocialBlade).

I was able to locate the backup that I took on March 7, 2019 (you'll notice a few videos in the index that were uploaded after this date, their basic details were added just from memory), however, because it's considered a 'premium' feature I did have to pay $20 to temporarily re-activate my subscription and then download the CSV. Which was obviously worth it in my opinion.

Even though the video files themselves weren't backed up, I'm still happy to have at least some part of my videos back. I guess you could think of them like gravestones, helping to mark something once active and alive so it's not forgotten.

Now, for anyone out there that might also be curious about the technical implementation of the Video Index, I built it myself using Laravel (which my website's been using since December 2022) along with Livewire so that searching, filtering, and the viewing the details of a video in the index is done all without the need for any page refreshes or redirects (or bunch of manual AJAX requests to write 😁).