backup-yt

Full backup tool for YouTube channels: videos, thumbnails, titles, descriptions, tags and subtitles — powered by yt-dlp.

Features

• Download every video from a channel, playlist, or a single video URL.
• Two modes: full video backup, or metadata-only (fast, low disk usage).
• Embeds thumbnail, subtitles and metadata directly into the video file.
• Saves per-video metadata as .info.json and .description files.
• Skips videos you already downloaded (resumable, safe to interrupt).
• Generates a summary.json and a summary.csv with every video's title, description, tags, URL and thumbnail.
• Colored console output (info / success / warning / error), no emojis.

Requirements

• Python 3.9 or higher.
• ffmpeg installed and available on your PATH (needed by yt-dlp to merge video/audio and embed thumbnails/subtitles).
• yt-dlp is installed automatically as a dependency of this package.

Installation

From PyPI:

pip install backup-yt

From source (for development):

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/backup-yt.git
cd backup-yt
pip install -e .

Usage

Once installed, the backup-yt command is available, or you can run the package directly with python3 -m backup_yt.

# Metadata and thumbnails only (fast, low disk usage)
backup-yt --url https://www.youtube.com/@MyChannel --metadata-only

# Full video backup at 1080p (default)
backup-yt --url https://www.youtube.com/@MyChannel

# Full video backup at 720p (less disk space)
backup-yt --url https://www.youtube.com/@MyChannel --quality 720

# A single playlist
backup-yt --url "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxxxx"

Options

Output structure

Each run creates a timestamped folder under youtube_backup/:

youtube_backup/
└── MyChannel_20260910/
    ├── summary.json
    ├── summary.csv
    ├── downloaded_history.txt
    └── MyChannel/
        └── 20240315 - Video title [videoId]/
            ├── Video title.mp4
            ├── Video title.info.json
            ├── Video title.description
            └── Video title.jpg

Project structure

backup_yt/
├── __main__.py       # entry point (python3 -m backup_yt)
├── cli.py            # argument parsing and orchestration
├── config.py         # shared constants
├── logger.py         # colored console output
├── storage.py        # folders, summary.json, summary.csv
└── yt_dlp_client.py  # yt-dlp invocation

License

MIT — see LICENSE.