How to find removed or forgotten YouTube videos
I was recently going through my personal YouTube account and looking at all the old videos I’ve added to various playlists and all the videos I’ve liked over the years. But something was missing. And that’s when I saw the feature to “show unavailable videos“.
To my dismay, I had about 30 videos that were no more. Clicking on them would either tell me that a) the channel no longer exists, b) the video was deleted, or c) the video was privatized. And the worst part was that YouTube provides zero information on what the video was. It doesn’t tell you the video name, or even what channel it belonged to! Because of this, videos that I presumably loved enough to like or add to a playlist, were lost to time.
The Tool
This online tool allows you to enter the original YouTube URL or ID and get back archived results including channel name, video name, published date, and thumbnail, if existing, to provide you with context on what the video was. And if you are lucky, you just might even get an archived backup of the video.
This tool primarily uses two sources: filmot.com, and archive.org so consider supporting them if you’ve found this useful.