So my friend @FlemishDog had their youtube channel suspended a while back, but thanks to some scripting (and mailing a 2tb internationally!) we've now got all 7,623 videos back online.

https://archive.org/details/flemishdog

Check it out! There's lots of neat promos and commercials, digitized off VHS/Betamax/U-matic (!) tape.
About half still need their metadata re-added, but he's working on it.

And if you like this, throw them a dollar or two on patreon, to fund more of this kind of work. They could use it, since they're no longer getting any revenue from their youtube channel. https://www.patreon.com/flemishdog/posts

BTW: keep in mind, youtube creators, your channel can get permanently suspended for 3 copyright strikes.
If you're building a channel, keep local copies (WITH METADATA!) or mirror them up to internet archive yourself. That way you can always rebuild.

if Rhys didn't keep all the source videos they had uploaded, the only solution would have been to re-digitize years of VHS tapes. That probably wouldn't happen, and all this would have been effectively lost.

and if you have videos on your channel that you no longer have source for, you can mirror them locally using "youtube-dl --write-info-json".
This'll grab the highest-quality copy off youtube and then write out all the associated metadata to a matching JSON file.

youtube-dl is cross platform, and available here:
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ 

fun fact: you can give it a channel URL or playlist URL, and it'll get them all!
You probably want to pass -i too, or it'll stop on errors (like unavailable videos)

and yes, the fastest way to get 500gb of videos back online from a backup in australia?
mail it to the US!

anyway the moral of the story: DON'T TRUST A COMPANY TO KEEP YOUR STUFF ONLINE, ESPECIALLY IF YOU'RE NOT PAYING THEM TO DO EXACTLY THAT.

The internet archive is slightly different, of course, being a non-profit, but that goes for them too. Keep your local copies just in case, if you can.

But if you have to pick between putting it on youtube and putting it on the internet archive: pick the archive.

they're a library. this is what they do: preserve stuff for future generations to look at!
youtube is a business: they're trying to sell ads. they want to make money off your content, and if keeping it online conflicts with that goal, they'll stop hosting it.

So I'm just saying: make sure you have a youtube exit plan.
I know a bunch of creators who were all into Blip, because it (at the time) let them have longer videos, had less intense copyright strike issues, and was all-around better for reviews and such.
Then Disney happened.

Disney shut it down after about 2 years, and a ton of creators were left trying to scramble to find other hosting.
Most ended up on youtube, but many videos had to be heavily edited to avoid hitting copyright strikes.

it was a big mess. And even if the entire site doesn't disappear out from under you, your individual channel can be suspended for silly reasons (Rhys lost theirs for some Japanese commercials from the 80s, I think) and you're in the same boat.

so yeah: Keep local copies, or keep copies in the archive, or both. You might need them.

And BTW, this kind of bullshit is nothing new.
The groundbreaking 1922 German Expressionist horror NOSFERATU only exists today because of illegal pirate copies. A court ordered all copies destroyed, and they would have succeeded except ONE copy made it out and got duplicated.

as @cstross said:
“Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians".”

The goal of companies is to make as much money off what they own as possible.
Sometimes that means preserving it forever, most of the time it doesn't.

You shouldn't trust them to preserve history, not their own history and not your content, either. That's not their goal.

And organizations have been incredibly short-sighted about these things in the past! They felt something was beyond making them any more money, so they destroyed it.
Look into the state of old Doctor Who episodes, for example.

Between 1967 and 1978 the BBC would routinely wipe or throw out old recordings. There were limits on how many times they could re-show them on TV, and after a few years they couldn't sell them abroad anymore, so they were erased and reused or tossed out.

97 episodes of one of the most influential sci-fi shows of all time are just GONE.
Unless we're exceptionally lucky and copies show up in private collectors hands, they do not exist anymore.

And Doctor Who is actually better than most shows of that era!
Z-Cars, a police drama from 1962-1978, is missing entire seasons. Gone.
Some of the first work of Brian Blessed! All thrown out.

This wasn't the BBC being uncaring, or malicious, but their job was not to preserve old material. And after a point they couldn't make money off this stuff, and it cost money to preserve it.
So it ended up in the trash. It's useless, it takes up space, throw out it, right?

Then suddenly everyone has a home video player and suddenly there's massive demand for back episodes of TV shows. Whoops.

And to their credit: The BBC is now doing a much better job with this.
Not only are they keeping old shows for the obvious reason of selling DVDs, but they recognize that they have to preserve their history, so that's now a goal they work on. they have a division and everything.

Anyway, this has entered the ramble zone.
My point: Check out Rhys' stuff, and give them some dollars on patreon.

And don't trust companies to keep your stuff. Keep it locally or make sure the internet archive has a copy.