Now, while I don't have Hyperthymesia, I did have something called TubeBuddy. If you're unsure of what that is, it's essentially a browser extension that provides a variety of different tools and metrics related to managing a YouTube channel. I used it myself for a few years 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 is only able to backup the metadata (title, description, tags, etc.) and not the actual video files themselves. 😢

Sometime in December 2021, for whatever reason, I suddenly remembered this feature and the fact that I may have used it at some point in the past. I immediately went to their website, logged in using my Google account, and there it was... the details of my once existent channel sitting in a state of digital purgatory since July 2019.

After a few solemn moments, I was able to locate the backup, in CSV format, that I made on March 7, 2019. Before I was able to download it though, I did have to pay $20 to reactive my subscription (as it's considered a "premium" feature) – Which was well worth it in my opinion.

Despite the videos themselves not being backed up, it still made me happy to at least have a record of them and their details back in my possession. I guess you could liken it to a headstone, to help mark the life of a once active "thing" so that it's not totally forgotten.

As for the technical implementation of the Video Index, I built it myself using Laravel (which my website's been powered by since December 2022) along with Livewire so that the searching, sorting, and viewing of a video's details are all done without the need for any page refreshes or a bunch of manual jQuery and AJAX code to write. 😅