Have you ever experienced the disappointment of a disappeared YouTube video? You know, when you want to watch something interesting or useful again, only to find the video is now deleted. I‘ve been there too, friend.
The good news is – with the right tricks, you can often still find these deleted videos!
In this guide, I‘ll share the best methods I‘ve discovered to recover or watch deleted YouTube videos again. Whether you have the video link or not, I‘ll show you effective tools to potentially get those videos back.
Let‘s start with the basics:
Why Do YouTube Videos Get Deleted?
According to YouTube, over 720,000 hours of content are uploaded every single day. With such a massive amount of videos, some are bound to eventually get removed.
Here are the main reasons YouTube videos can get deleted:
- The video owner deletes it themselves
- YouTube deletes the video for violating policies like nudity, hate speech, or copyright
- The account that uploaded the video gets terminated or deleted
In 2020 alone, YouTube deleted over 1.6 million videos and terminated over 6 million accounts for policy violations. So deletions on the platform are quite common.
Can You Recover a Deleted YouTube Video?
Unlike an email service like Gmail, YouTube does not have a trash folder to easily restore deleted videos. Once deleted, the video is generally gone from YouTube‘s servers.
However, that doesn‘t mean the video is lost forever online. With the right tools and some digging, you can often still find and recover deleted YouTube videos.
Succeeding depends largely on two factors:
1. Having the Video Link – If you have the specific URL to the deleted video, it becomes much easier to locate a copy or archived version elsewhere through various internet tools.
2. The Video‘s Online History – How long the video was public before deletion, how popular or obscure it was, and whether it was reposted frequently improves your chances of finding a copy on other sites.
So it‘s worth trying to recover even without a link, but your likelihood increases if you have the video URL.
Let‘s look at the different tactics to find deleted YouTube videos:
Method 1: Recover from Your YouTube History
If you watched the now-deleted video somewhat recently, it may still be lurking in your YouTube watch history.
YouTube keeps your full watch history available for up to one year before auto-deleting the oldest entries. So here‘s how to find deleted videos in your history:
Step 1) Open YouTube and click your profile icon > YouTube Studio.
Step 2) In the left menu, select Content > View All YouTube Analytics.
Step 3) Navigate to Audience > Viewership.
Step 4) Under "Top Videos", change the date range filter to find the deleted video in your history.
Step 5) Click the video title to open it and copy the URL.
This URL can then be used with the other methods below to find copies of the deleted video.
Method 2: Check Your Liked Videos
If you had previously liked the now-deleted video, you can potentially get the link from your Liked videos playlist.
Step 1) On YouTube, click your profile picture > Liked videos.
Step 2) Browse through your liked video playlist for the deleted video.
Step 3) Once found, right click on the video title > Copy video URL.
This retrieves the link to use for recovering the video through other tools.
Method 3: Look Through Playlists
If you had added the deleted video to any public YouTube playlists, you can get the link from there.
Step 1) On YouTube, go to Your channel > Playlists.
Step 2) Open the playlist that had contained the deleted video.
Step 3) Right click the video and choose Copy video URL.
Retrieving the link this way allows you to search for the video through various online archives.
Method 4: Use the Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine at archive.org is a digital archive of over 438 billion web pages. It can serve as your internet "time machine" to see if the deleted YouTube video was saved here before being removed.
Here‘s how to check for the video:
Step 1) Go to archive.org and enter the deleted video‘s URL into the search bar.
Step 2) Click on the calendar icon beside any date results.
Step 3) This opens an archived snapshot of that page from the past. See if the video loads and plays successfully.
Tip: Use the timestamps and archive dates to narrow down searches for the deleted video.
The Wayback Machine doesn‘t archive every page on the internet. But for videos that had some popularity and history, there‘s a decent chance of finding a copy here.
Method 5: Try the Embed Trick
This clever trick can help you locate copies of the deleted video reposted on other sites:
Step 1) Take the deleted video‘s YouTube URL.
Step 2) Replace the "watch?v=" part with "embed/".
For example:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=abcd123 becomes www.youtube.com/embed/abcd123
Step 3) Search this new embedded link on Google and check the results for copies of the video uploaded to other platforms.
The embed link allows easy embedding anywhere. So people often re-upload copies of viral videos this way.
Method 6: Use Google Search Operators
Google search operators let you search for copies of a video based on specific parameters.
To try finding the deleted video this way:
Step 1) From the original YouTube URL, copy the unique video ID (the series of letters/numbers after "v=").
Step 2) Type this ID into Google wrapped in operators like "intitle:ID", or "inurl:ID".
For example: intitle:abcd123 or inurl:abcd123
Step 3) Browse through the search results for copies of the video reposted elsewhere.
This method leverages Google‘s powerful indexing to surface copies that may still exist online.
Method 7: YouTube Video Finder Extension
This handy browser extension automatically searches the Wayback Machine for deleted YouTube videos.
To use it:
Step 1) Install the "YouTube Video Finder" extension for Chrome/Firefox.
Step 2) Right click on a deleted video title.
Step 3) Select "Find video" to begin searching the Wayback Machine.
Step 4) Click on any calendar icon with results to see if the video was archived.
This makes it super quick and easy to check the Wayback Machine for deleted videos.
What If You Don‘t Have the Video Link?
Recovering a deleted video becomes much harder if you don‘t have the specific YouTube URL. But here are a few last ditch things to try:
– Search the video title on Google wrapped in "site:youtube.com". Sometimes an alternate copy exists under the same name.
– Check social media accounts of the video creator to see if it was reposted anywhere else, like Facebook.
– Submit a request on Reddit – The r/tipofmytongue subreddit is great for finding elusive online content.
– Scan the Wayback Machine for the video using the title if you remember it.
Without a direct URL, recovering deleted YouTube videos is unfortunately unlikely. But you can get lucky if copies exist on other parts of the internet.
Recovering Deleted Videos You Uploaded
If the video was deleted directly from your own YouTube account, there are a couple last options:
– Contact YouTube Support – If you‘re a YouTube Partner, you can email them to request reinstating deleted videos.
– Check online backups – See if you had the video saved in a cloud backup like Google Drive or Dropbox.
And if you had downloaded the video to your computer, data recovery software may be able to retrieve it from the hard drive.
Protecting Your Videos in the Future
To avoid losing your videos forever in the future, be sure to:
- Download copies to store offline.
- Use multiple cloud backup services.
- Repost popular videos across different platforms.
This redundancy makes it much easier to recover lost videos, even if deleted from YouTube.
The Bottom Line
Trying to find deleted YouTube videos can definitely be a challenge. But with the right tools and search techniques, you‘d be surprised at what can be recovered online.
The next time one of your favorite videos disappears from YouTube, don‘t lose all hope just yet. Use this guide to help track that video down across the internet‘s nooks and crannies.
With some creative searching, there‘s a decent chance you can watch that beloved deleted video again. Let me know if you have any other tips or tricks for finding deleted YouTube videos!