- One of the scariest things that can happen
to any content creator is if their YouTube channel
gets hacked or deleted,
and all of their videos are gone.
What would you do in this situation?
(lighthearted music)
Hey, TubeBuddies.
Today, I wanna have a quick chat about safety and security
when it comes to protecting your own data online
and on YouTube.
Now, I know this is not typical
of what we always talk about,
but I think this one is important.
So, let's go ahead and get started.
In the last few years,
we've seen a definite uptick in number of channels
that have gotten deleted or hacked,
or taken over with all of their content being deleted.
We've seen this from multiple million channel users
like Jim Browning, as well as Meghan Rienks.
Now in both of their cases,
their channels were taken over by someone else
and their content was deleted.
Eventually, both of them got their channels back.
But if you had to put all of your videos on there again
and there was none of that data there anymore,
what would you be able to do?
'Cause could you go back
and remember every single description box,
every single title, and every single tag you'd use
on all of your previous videos?
For some channels with hundreds or thousands of videos,
this would be an impossible task.
Now, one thing you could do
is go in with the generic bulk replacement
of your description box.
But if you did have links to special sites,
affiliate programs, anything like that,
you would lose all of that information.
So of course, we're gonna talk a little bit about
how TubeBuddy can help you in this way as well,
as well as some preventative channel maintenance.
Now, one thing I think all people can benefit from
is running checks on your own channel,
whether it's the end of the year like we're coming up on
or at the end of each month or quarter on a regular basis,
to go in and actually collect data about your channel.
Let me show you how we can help with this.
If you go to tubebuddy.com
and go into the Channel Backup section,
you'll be able to select
if you wanna run a backup of your channel's metadata.
And this is gonna include the titles, the URL,
all of the tags that you use, the entire description box,
all of the information pertaining to your videos.
And then, it's going to export them into a CSV file
that you can download and keep for yourself for safekeeping.
Now one nice thing,
if you wanna reduce the time it takes
for this report to run,
you can actually select backup
just from the last time you updated your data
or you can request all of your channel's data
in all of your videos.
Now, when you kick off a report like this,
it can take anywhere from a few hours
to even a couple of days,
depending on how much data you have
and how many people may be running channel backups as well.
One huge benefit of having all those information
in one data set is that you could also go through
and look for affiliate links.
And if you're looking for something
where you're looking to replace one,
and you see that it's used a lot
because you were looking for it,
then you could actually kick off
a bulk find, replace, append.
where you actually switch out an affiliate link
and change them all in one click of a button.
Another amazing benefit of having it all
in a CSV or dataset file
is that you're going to be able to share this with others.
So if you have a social media coordinator perhaps
on your team,
they'll be able to go in and take the information
that they need.
Whether it's information at the top of the description box,
if they wanna put it on a quote,
if they wanna put it in a tweet,
if they wanna go ahead and share out that information,
they have all of the information,
including the title and the URL,
which would make it so much easier for them
to be able to publicize posts about your videos.
Without having to grant them permissions
to your YouTube channel,
but still giving them all of the information that they need
to be able to complete their job.
I wanna take a moment and put onscreen
the comment of the video.
Thank you so much for interacting with our latest video.
And if you want your comment
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make sure you comment on this one.
In some lucky instances where channels were hacked,
people are able to recover them
and have their videos put back on,
but all of their description box and details
have been wiped.
If you did have this dataset already downloaded,
it would be a really quick copy and paste
to put in all of the information
to match up with your videos again.
And in the unfortunate event
where you actually would have to go in
and re-upload all of your videos again,
we also have a column in the sheet
that is going to tell you
what the original name of the video file was.
So, that can make it easier for searching
when you are going back through your old data sets
to see where that video files still is.
Now, if you do find yourself
in the unfortunate situation of having your channel hacked,
deleted, or inaccessible to you,
you can do a few things.
One, you can reach out to team YouTube on Twitter.
Two, you may be able to send an email to YouTube directly.
Number three, if you have a channel partner manager,
you may be able to reach out to them as well.
And if you happen to be affiliated
with some sort of network,
you might be able to reach out to your managers
at that network and have them reach out to YouTube as well.
Now, those are all actions you can take
after something has happened to your channel,
but there are some preventative measures
that can be put in place as well.
You'll want to make sure
that you have two-factor authentication enabled
on your account.
In fact, YouTube themselves have encouraged this
and required it for people who are accessing YouTube Studio.
I would encourage you to use a strongly generated password
of a longer length so that it's harder for people
to guess what your password is.
I'm talking to all of you password123 people out there.
I would also highly encourage you to have a separate email
that you only use for YouTube related business,
whether that's your AdSense or it's your YouTube channel.
It's probably not the one
that you're using every single day.
Now, if you are someone
who has a harder time remembering passwords,
especially as they get longer and more complex,
you can definitely use a software service
like LastPass or 1Password
or even hardware, such as a YubiKey,
to help you remember and store your passwords.
Question of the day.
When was the last time you backed up
your YouTube channel's data?
Comment it down below, I'd like to know.
Channel backups are accessible and available to everyone
on Star plan or higher of TubeBuddy.
Now the end of the year is a great time
to think about channel backups and maintenance,
but I wanna highly encourage you
to make sure that it's part of a continual process
all year long.
Thank you so much for hanging out with us, TubeBuddies.
We'll see in the next one. Bye.