Today we are going to teach you several ways how to undelete a youtube video. Youtube is probably the best video sharing website that we currently have access to for free. But not everything always goes according to a plan. And sometimes we do things by mistake, or the pc freezes, we click a bunch of times and video that we have edited for days and also rendering for hours with the neverending upload, we delete by mistake. Some of us are prepared for such an error because we have experienced this accident several times. But let’s say we don’t.
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What are the ways to undelete a youtube video from our channel
There are several ways to do it. I will walk you through all of them, and hopefully at least one will work in your case!
Method number 1: Contact yt Help Support
This is the easiest method to do, but it usually only works for channels who have at least 10,000 views on their YT channel in the past 12 months, or they are part of a Youtube Partner Program. Follow these steps to contact the youtube help support successfully:
- First of all, you need to go to youtube.com and sign in to your Gmail which is associated with your youtube channel, if you have several channels, choose the one on which you have deleted the video on accident.
- Scroll down to the very bottom of the page and click on Help
- Click on Need more Help and then Get Creator Support
- Then you need to choose the right category of your issue and click on Email Support, or you might go ahead and click on contact the Creator Support team, they both work just as fine.
Method number 2: Way Back Machine Method
If you never have ahead of Way Back Machine, it is internets archive. And with it, you will be able to recover your deleted youtube video. Just go to archive.org and follow these exact steps:
- You need to find the link to your deleted video. Without it, you won’t be able to do the next steps. You might be able to find it in your browser history, or maybe you have shared it on your social media
- Once you have URL of that vid, go to archive.org
- Paste the URL of your video and search for it
- You won’t be able to play the video, but you should be able to download it, if you right click on the video, there should be an option to save or download
This method works only sometimes, archive.org needs time to crawl the web to archive the sites, I would say that this method works 50% of the time, but don’t worry. I am going to share with you several other ways how to undelete a youtube video from your channel.
Method number 3: HDD Recovery
There are many HDD recovery programs out there. Some are paid, and some are free. But almost all of them have the same functions. They will let you recover data from deleted and even formatted a hard drive. Most of them also work for external HDDs, flash drives, and even SD cards. Most of the time, these programs are used when your device is damaged to retrieve the data from it. But yes, it can be used to restore your deleted youtube video, which I have done myself several times. I have always used Disk Drill software to do this.
Because a few years ago, when my external HDD died, I stumbled upon this software, and I have recovered almost all of my data from that drive. So ever since then, I am using Disk Drill, there are many other options out there. But it has worked me perfectly every time I have used it and also it is available for both Mac and Windows, which is quite lovely, that is probably the reason why I have never sought out for software from their competitions because I never had to since they work on both of those operating systems.
Don’t worry, this is quite an easy process, but I will walk you through it step by step.
The best way to undelete a youtube video with Disk Drill is to download the software to a different hard drive, or if that is not púossible, try to download it to a separate partition of the drive. Your deleted video was.
OK, so now you know that you should not use that drive if possible, you can, but you will have fewer chances of recovering the deleted video. The steps are quite the same as Windows and Mac, so let’s go through them.
- Download the Disk Drill for Windows / Mac and install it on your computer
- Start the Disk Drill
- Select the drive or partition of the drive, that use to contain the youtube video or videos, which you have deleted
- Make sure that you have chosen the right drive/partition. Once you have done that, you can click on the Recover button. Which will initiate the process of scanning the disk. If you remember correctly, where was the video located, you can filter the filetype or choose the folder in which the video was
- Now you should see the folder, where your video was located, open the folder and find your video. Click on the video that you want to recover and choose the folder where you want to get video recovered. But keep in mind, that is best to select a different folder, preferably different hard drive as a place where the video should be restored
- Click on the Recover button for the second time, and the selected file or files will be recovered to a location of your choosing.
This is how to retrieve a deleted youtube video from your windows/mac computer via Disk Drill software.
Method number 4: Recovering your youtube video from a system backup
This latter method is operating system dependent, and I am not sure if Macs even have this option. But for all windows users, you can quite easily use your working system backup as a solution to your issue. The only problem is, when you recover your time to the last time of your backup, you might lose some files, which you have created since then. Most of us have this option set off, so we have one or two recovery backups. Right now, as I am writing this article, I just checked, and my last back up is from 3 years ago.
So if none of the methods above have worked for you, you might give this a try, but you have to decide how important this video was for you because you are risking to lose other data in exchange for this video, which you want to “undelete.”
And yes, you can prepare for this, that yo back up your files on another hard drive or flash drive, before getting through with the OS recovery option, but still, if the back up is few weeks or months old, there is a good chance that you will miss some files, while backing up. Trust me, this has happened to me so many times, but not with restoring videos, but quite similar situations.
My last thoughts on How to undelete a youtube video
If you are serious about how to undelete a youtube video, which you have deleted by mistake or unwittingly from your youtube channel, I will start with method number 1. Yes, it will take some time before youtube reaches out to you, but they are the best bet for you. If they do it, you will have your YT vid back in the best quality possible, and they might even restore it on youtube, instead of getting you back your file, which is less work for you.
But for this to happen, you have to be patient, they might reply to you in a day or a week.
If you can’t wait or you do not have enough views on your channel, definitely try the archive org method. If you have a small channel with minimal views, there is a good chance that your video won’t be there, because they did not crawl it yet. But if the video has at least a few 100 views, this method might work out for you. Especially if you have shared your video on social media with hashtags, etc. Then you have an excellent chance of having your video there.
If both methods 1 & 2 did not work for you. The method number 3 works great, if you can, get a premium version of the software, or at least I have it. So I am not sure how capable is the free version of the software. But I can’t even describe how good their software is. I was able to recover not only deleted things from my hard drive, but several times I have restored external HDDs and broken sd and micro sd cards.
The latter method works, but as I have said, I am not sure if this is even a possibility on Mac. And if you are windows user, this is definitely a possibility, but as I have mentioned, you can lose different data, and there is also a good chance that you don’t have any recent back up to restore from. This would be my last resort, and even then, I would hesitate if I should go through with it, and that is coming from someone who had done this successfully several times.
Best way to never get to this trouble is to back up your files correctly, either get a google drive or sync everything on your cloud, I am sure there are many other ways to store your data. Or get a separate 1TB HDD and store everything there, you can even have multiple 1 or 2 TB external HDDs. I save all my work and my videos over there. I do it every week, and I don’t have to worry if anything happens to my pc or not. Nowadays, external hard drives are not that expensive anyway.
And to be honest, in the last few years, there have been so many scandals with leaked photos and data from almost all these services, so even though they are convenient, I back up everything on my external drives. And I am not worried about those, because they are only used for a few minutes each week when I am copying the files, so they will outlive me. If anyone is wondering, I am using this external hard drive.
So this is it, I have no more words to say about how to undelete a youtube video, I hope that this tutorial has helped you and that you know how to get your video back. And please keep in mind that prevention is the key; if you have backed up your videos and data in general, you would not have this issue.