 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel Daniel Rossell here again. I am going to be doing a video on backup options for YouTube creators It's not going to be like the most exciting video But a because of the topic be because of the way I'm presenting it It's going to just be me drawing out some diagrams But I've been interested in backup and data protection for a number of years And I think that those who get backup understand why backups necessary It's not the sexiest thing to be thinking about but it is super important if you've ever lost your data Because you didn't have a backup, you know how painful that is and sometimes data loss is Irretrievable or irreparable. So it's really something that if you are creating a lot of great videos on YouTube And you want to make sure that There's some protection in place that you know, if you got locked out of your account Through whatever reason or YouTube deletes a video because they changed there There they change their content policies or you integrate your YouTube account with some rogue app that gets hit by malware and it like You know destroys all your deletes all your YouTube videos. All these are unlikely scenarios, but they're not impossible scenarios So that's the reason and besides YouTube is just a platform. It's a third party owned platform. It's not There in order to like guarantee that's not your data is your responsibility So just putting it up on YouTube and saying, oh, it's good. It's on YouTube YouTube or hosting it It's gonna be fine forever is not an advisable approach So you should take your take control of your own data So I'm gonna show you guys in this video like a few different Backup options you can use ranging from a really something really simple to something a little bit more complicated But more robust and I'm just gonna be plotting them out this diagramming software By the way, it's called draw.io So you're a creator you're a video creator and it does this by the way could be applied equally to podcasts or even writing it just The type of data is kind of irrelevant when you're talking about backup, it's just video data is heavier than podcast typically and Audio is almost always heavier than writing if like writing is your thing So you could substitute YouTube for WordPress and or for wherever you host your podcast, etc But I'm just gonna focus. I'm just gonna use YouTube as the kind of example for this So when you're creating video to YouTube There's a couple of reasons besides the one that I've outlined why YouTube shouldn't really be considered a backup in itself Even though YouTube is in the cloud and people think the cloud is like gonna be here forever And it's indestructible, which is not necessarily the case It is the case that the cloud is very redundant for data storage, which means that YouTube being hosted on Google Has crazy server infrastructure that makes sure that when you put up a video it doesn't just vanish they have everything It's not quite backup. It's more redundancy that there is Servers the data scattered and servers around the world So you don't we don't have to worry about it not being available But it's going to be a D You're not gonna have you're not gonna be able to extract from YouTube the original quality of your video So when you upload to YouTube the first thing YouTube does with the video is it compresses it And it's got a proprietary really really good proprietary compression algorithm That for that makes the video lighter so that it can stream more easily, right? So there's two ways to get your videos out of YouTube One of those is using download video that button in your YouTube studio and the other one is using Google Takeout Which people commonly think of as a backup software and it's not a backup software It's a I guess you could call it a data export software It's use case is not intended for backup So whether you use Google Takeout to get your YouTube data or you just do it manually You're not going to be getting your original video back So you don't even have that when you're just like let's say you upload a file to YouTube and delete your local file That's a really bad idea because now you don't have any copy of your original video the master track, right? So that's why so that's certainly not recommended but what you can do in a lightweight approach is to just keep one On-site backup now. I'm going to I'm going to be I'm going to try to be consistent here I'm going to use yellow for backups and green for you as a creator at the epicenter of this world So You can do an on-site backup and this is what a lot of people will do now in terms of options for on-site backup So that's keeping a copy so you finish with your video and then you see you upload it to YouTube And then you say I'm not going to delete this file. I'm going to back up this file So the first place on-site backup. It's called on-site because it means It's on your premises whether that's your house or like your office. It doesn't really matter You're not storing this particular backup somewhere like the cloud Which is really basically just means someone else's computer. So regard regarding on-site backup for video There's really two options. There's one common option and there's one more obscure option But because I'm into it. I'm going to put it out there so one is going to be called I'm going to call this live backup and Live backup. So this is an either or arrow flow here. Okay, you don't need to do both There's no real reason I can think of you'd need to do to On-site backups the idea of backup is always to minimize risk, right? So you could take six on-site backups if you have storage, but that wouldn't really be smart Network attached storage or an NAS or a server and really an NAS is just a type of server It's a data specific server. So that's basically something that you plug in if you don't want an NAS is you plug it into your power and it has It's a live now. I'm using the word live to mean that it's on the network It's it's requires electricity to run and it uses something called rage random independent array of disks and Basically raid has really good redundancy. So once you have your files on an NAS you It's pretty crazy one of those hard drives in your NAS can fail And the idea of raid is that the data will survive because it's got this crazy tech for like putting it splitting the file over different Different hard drives the problem really I see with an NAS for storage is if we're looking for a backup approach That's going to scale right if you're just doing a few videos fine If you're starting to if you starting to create like gigabytes or terabytes or even petabytes of video data You're gonna run out of an ES storage pretty quickly now You can typically NAS is have a number of bays That's a number of hard drives that can be like stuck into the NAS and you could try to like, you know get bigger Swap out smaller hard drives as bigger ones But at some point you're probably gonna have to buy a whole another NAS a whole new machine And start from scratch versus doing something like cold backup Which basically means it's a form of on-site backup where you are going to be I'm gonna try to get an arrow out of this guy here You're going to be backing up your data. It's going to be on-site But it's going to be on a storage medium that is not a computer So the problem here is something called bit rod or data rod and that's that data Unlike if you write something on paper And you you know the paper survives by the way There is a crazy class of paper called archival paper that's intended to last a long time But if you just write stuff on paper that you know the writing is pretty good when we're talking about storing computer files We're effectively talking about storing Billions of ones and zeros in the perfect order for the file to be readable It's actually a lot more complicated and when you store data cold There's a tendency for that data to Degrade so whether we're talking about hard drives which demagnetize over time or DVDs which tend to have a layer that melts away Data rot is a problem. So I'm going to just put that in like parentheses here data rot So that's the advantage of an NAS is because it's a live computer system You're going to be protected to a large extent against data rot For cold storage for archival the typical medium has been what's called LTO or tape a lot of people Outside of you don't have anything to do with enterprise tech. Don't even know the tape is still a thing that exists It's based on just Google LTO tape and Google images and you can see exactly what it looks like It is actually a tape like remember the way there used to be cassette tapes and it's used for data storage now LTO is Resistant to Data rot. It's sorry. It's not not completely resistant. It's just less there's less of a problem versus Hard drives which are really not intended for long-term archival storage and the second option You're going to have here is what's called the m-disk. This is a totally obscure Medium and it's not huge capacity, but I just did an interview with the m-disk guy and it's really fascinating tech It's actually a form of storage media intended specifically for long long term cold archival storage, right? So you have basically in terms of your onsite This would even work traditional option to build yourself an LTO library The problem with this approach is that LTO tapes are super cheap LTO drives are really expensive because the typical buyer here is a big enterprise So as a small youtuber or as a small creator It's definitely more economical to either go down the NAS right or even go down the m-disk right the m-disk Just they they're not that expensive you get a special Blu-ray burner for like a hundred dollars on Amazon It's actually a pretty affordable way of doing archival versus LTO So this to me would be one backup approaching and a zoom out a little bit Your videos are up on YouTube, but you're hedging your bets by keeping everything you create in archival storage Whether that's a live backup on in your premises or a cold backup now There's one more thing you can do to really really Bulletproof your your your video backup approach and that's keeping an off-site backup Now the reason off off-site backup exists is basically because if you think about it You have all your videos on YouTube. We've already established that it's not going to get you your master copy This is going to be preserving your master copy, but what happens? God forbid if your house burns tight Whether you have it on NAS or whether you have it on LTO or whether you have it on m-disk It's not going to help matters your backups are destroyed and now we have no original copy of our data Or I don't know you have a party and someone throws your NES in the swimming pool And you're like, oh there goes all my YouTube data So these are not these are not very likely possibilities when we're talking about backup We are in the business of talking about Protecting against obscure things that can go wrong because as a guy called Murphy said whatever can go wrong will go wrong so off-site backup means basically Creating a backup copy in a second physical location Now the common places for that would be you can do I'm going to call it like manual off-site Manual off-site, and I'm going to do the cloud right so manual off-site means because backup is I'm going to say here like you know you want to probably store it in some kind of backup You don't want to put it in Google Drive because it's not designed for this You want to put it in some kind of cloud storage that specifically intended for backup like AWS or back plays B2 So Where are we oh, yeah the off-site backup So what I mean by manual off-site is because the whole principle of an off-site backup is just backing up your data to some other Location if you're if you live in New York and your friend lives in Chicago You could post the after every time you create an M disc and you M disc you could literally post them right Text here. I'm going to say post to your friend Okay, you could literally send a disc in the post Every time you burn one to your friend and you could say to your friend. I'm going to pay you You know 50 bucks a year. That's a bit cheap $300 a year to keep your collection to keep my collection of M discs in your attic And that's technically an off-site backup, right? There's no commercial entity involved here I am there are companies that do this professionally or you can try to be creative now The other one is the cloud and the cloud is kind of more more classic The cloud would be something again like really it's again the cloud is the cloud is anyone else's computer, but When we're talking about it in this context of backup, we're probably looking for object storage So that tends to be specific cloud services like AWS or back plays B2 Which is a cheap competitor. So that's basically and then now once you if you're doing let's say your options are I'm going to highlight these in green. I'm going to go for M disc Gonna color this green Whoops, I'm going to color my M disc backup green here green I'm going to do AWS. I'm going to cover the color of this green as well Now this is a three-two-one complaint backup approach, right? The data that is publicly available as they're on YouTube But you're not risking the destruction of your original data because you have it in an onsite backup location You one copy here in your in your attic and just in case something happens to your onsite You periodically duplicate that off-site and if you have an NES by the way They they commonly have the Synology ESes have these great programs if I can just do one last arrow here It's going to be a bit. I don't think they software is liking this crazy arrow I'm trying to do between NAS and back plays is probably I'm sure there's a way to do it. I'm missing that there we go, right? So you can also there's a software on NES's Called cloud sync and that'll allow you to sync your NES directly with the cloud the Advantage of post your friend backup is it doesn't require internet. This is Over the internet and the reason I personally can't do this and many other people can't do this is because When we're talking about moving video We're talking about high gigabyte data and you need to you need a really good connection to get up to the cloud I imagine in very soon in coming years That is not going to be a problem because bandwidth will get better worldwide Now you can do two off-site backups This is you can do two off-site backups the reason I wouldn't recommend this is the disadvantage of off-site Is that you're committing your data to a third party you need to keep paying it for them to store your data? So doing that twice wouldn't really bring any benefits overdoing it just once So that's why traditionally backup approaches have been split the best of my knowledge between one onsite and One off-site because one copy is under your management and one copy is under somebody else's management I think that's pretty much all I have to say about it. This is kind of the full Overview of what you can do with your YouTube data, and I hope this has been helpful for someone. Thank you guys for watching