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I used to have my pics and videos stored on two hard drives as well as Google Photos. However, I'm reaching the end of my allocated space. My dad told me "the solution is simple, the videos are usually what take the most space. Simply transfer all your videos to YouTube and set them to private, and they'll be stored permanently without paying a cent." (that is, until YouTube changes their policy like Alphabet did with the "unlimited" storage on Photos).

I've downloaded all my videos and have begun uploading them to my channel as private videos. But I can't help but wonder, is it right to do so? YT is primarily a "sharing" platform, a social media. I don't want them to delete all my precious memories because they've been set to private for too long, or some other reason.

Is it 'right' to use YT as a long-term online storage solution for private videos?

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Setting aside whether it's "right" or not in the moral sense, let's look at the practical side of things and ask "Does it make SENSE to store my videos on YouTube?"

I'd say no, for several reasons.

  1. YouTube may change their terms of service at any time and may even lay claim to any uploaded content as their own. They could decide to remove any videos not accessed within the last xx years, for example.

  2. YouTube downsamples your videos when you upload them, so if you rely solely on them for storage, you'll never get back the full resolution original video.

Alternatives:

One or more free OneDrive/Dropbox/Box/etc accounts will give you quite a bit of storage. All of them treat your files AS files; they don't change them, downsample them or the like.

Add another hard drive. The price of small, portable external drives is quite reasonable ... US$85-125 roughly for a 4 terabyte drive. Internal drives are even cheaper, if your PC has spare drive slots and you're ok with installing a drive yourself. And saving to a drive will be WAY faster than uploading to any cloud storage space.

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    Of course OneDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox/Box/etc. could also change their policies with regards to file retention. The problem with long term file retention is that it's literally impossible to predict the storage format of tomorrow (PATA, SATA, Blu-ray, etc..). So we can't tell you that the NVMe SSD you use today as a backup, will be supported by motherboards in 5 years, I never thought I would see the day optical drives would be considered optional and would require an external drive to be supported.
    – Ramhound
    Nov 30, 2021 at 17:42
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    An additional backup is a good idea, indeed. That could be either online storage (though not YouTube for reasons described earlier) or just another portable HDD. I keep two of these and rotate them. Back up everything I need to, drop it off at a relative or friend's house or even a safe deposit box; retrieve the HDD that's there, bring it home, use it for the next back up. I figure if some calamity takes out both of the HDDs, it's probably taken out my computers, and likely the municipal electric utility and maybe even me ;-) So the backups are the least of my worries in that case.
    – Steve Rindsberg
    Nov 30, 2021 at 17:42
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    @Ramhound Absolutely correct. Probably not all in the same way at the same time, but over time? Likely, I'd think. My money's on HDDs. As are my files. ;-)
    – Steve Rindsberg
    Nov 30, 2021 at 17:44
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    @SteveRindsberg - I would be more worried about file stored on a mechanical drive, not because the possibility the drive wouldn't have the files, but due to the fact there won't be a machine that supports SATA in 5 years. USB devices that mount the drive do exist, but there compatibility, is only as good as the engineering team that creates the controller. One almost has to spread their files across multiple services, multiple traditional storage devices (and multiple standards i.e. NVMe and SATA), and physical media.
    – Ramhound
    Nov 30, 2021 at 17:48
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    Everyone thought floppy drives would last forever....until they were a thing of the past and you have 5.5" disks that were connect by SCSI and no machine running an OS that even supports the device. I have a 7 foot rack full of PATA drives, connected to a legacy IBM mainframe through ESCON connection from 15 years ago. Newer mainframes have zero supported for ESCON and only support FICON. ESCON support ended 10 years ago. Bottom Line: Spread the hurt, make multiple copies, and hope you picked at least one that will exist next year. Repeat until you are dead.
    – Ramhound
    Nov 30, 2021 at 17:53
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It is NOT. Even with the current terms you're not safe, for example (emphasis mine):

We may also need to alter or discontinue the Service, or any part of it, in order to make performance or security improvements, change functionality and features, make changes to comply with law, or prevent illegal activities on or ABUSE OF OUR SYSTEMS.

You never know if YouTube will suddenly decide to interpret that storing of terabytes of data as private videos is using the service as local storage and therefore an abuse.

Furthermore (emphasis mine):

...there will be times when we need to make such changes WITHOUT NOTICE, such as where we need to take action to improve the security and operability of our Service, prevent abuse, or meet our legal requirements

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Is YouTube a good way to store personal videos on the long run?

You have no control over YouTube and no guarantee what they'll do in the future. YouTube is a private company and has no obligation to you personally, especially if they provide a free service to you.

A service should never be the only place where any important media meaningful to you should exist. However it wouldn't hurt to keep them on YouTube as well, just make sure it's not the only place.

I'm pretty sure if you view your private videos on YouTube, or share them with people you'll know, you'll still see ads, so you aren't stealing anything from YouTube by doing what you want to do IMHO.

Buy an external hard drive and keep them there. Things like the 3-2-1 backup strategy can help protect against data loss from personal disasters/catastrophes.

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  • Thanks for the answer. I love the 3-2-1 strategy and I will try to live by it, this is why I wanted an online storage for video to replace Google Photos. For local storage, I have my internal 2 Tb HDD + an external 1 Tb HDD. I was planning into investing into a large SSD (1+ Tb) to have an extra backup.
    – C. Crt
    Nov 30, 2021 at 20:28
  • One thought: Do you need the speed of an SSD or would the extra $ be better applied to a larger but slower spinning HDD?
    – Steve Rindsberg
    Dec 1, 2021 at 17:24
  • Looking at this a couple of years later, I'm reconsidering my comment above. SSDs have gotten considerably less expensive in the last couple of years. Now, I might go for the SSD, not so much for speed but for the lack of moving parts --> reliability.
    – Steve Rindsberg
    Oct 7, 2023 at 15:34
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I agree with the suggestions to maintain local copies, but would also add that there are some very inexpensive and more reliable cloud storage options out there to use as offsite backups. Backblaze offers unlimited storage for $7/month (as of Q4 2021), and AWS has Glacier Deep Archive storage for $0.00099/GB/month, or about a dollar per terabyte.

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