[implying]

As useless and pithy it is to say "just restore from backup", having your livelihood (or a significant time investment) depend on a system far outside of your control, where you have no service guarantees or even a billable relationship, is a fairly shaky ground to stand on. Ultimately if you spend your time producing digital assets, you should have taken action to ensure you had ownership and control over them somewhere.

[dang]

> you should have

Please don't scold someone who's already in a shitty situation, or lecture them with the obvious. That breaks the HN guidelines, notably this one: "Be kind."

It's extremely easy to do this kind of thing on the internet and not as easy to realize the effect it has on people, and also on the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[markdown]

I know this, you know this, and OP has for damned sure just realised this, as has anyone else who's read this post.

What the purpose of your comment? It's not helpful.

[sodality2]

To give everyone else who hasn't done these things a harsh reminder of the damage it could bring if you don't.

[stingraycharles]

The grandparent’s post sounds like it was written towards the OP, though, not everyone else.

If that weren’t the case, I agree with you, it’s a good message to spread.

[indymike]

Maybe leave out the harsh?

[______-_-______]

If even one person sees that comment and pulls their content out of the google ecosystem, then the comment was helpful.

Run this:

youtube-dl https://youtube.com/c/MyChannel

and have a snack while it finishes. You'll thank yourself later.

[kodt]

Should not creators already have local copies of videos they upload to YouTube?

[Ekaros]

They should. And if they don't it is clear the video have no future value for them. So why should it have for anyone else?

[sodality2]

I know plenty of people who say, "Well, it's on YouTube, it's not gonna shut down any time soon" so they delete their local copies, unfortunately

[sliken]

Many people have a naive trust of free services. If your livelyhood/business depends on uploaded files, do not trust Facebook, Youtube, Gmail, Google docs, etc to store it forever.

I think it's important to mention that such trust is misplaced and risky, ALWAYS make backups. Sure it's generally common sense for many, but the OPs story is a nice example.

[mastazi]

> Many people have a naive trust of free services.

I don't think that that's particularly true of HN readership though.

If GP's comment was on a more mainstream forum e.g. Reddit, then I would agree with you, but as it stands it feels a bit gratuitous.

[rapfaria]

I'm not sure OP has realised this, with remarks like "indicating cyber bullying".

[antoniuschan99]

I hope she can recover those videos. Aside from not backing up initially, I’m also wondering why or if she did anything after getting those 3 strike warnings :$

[ForHackernews]

What can you do? Isn't a bot? It's not like you can respond and explain yourself.

[IshKebab]

I think he meant something like "shit they're going to remove all my videos in 2 days, I'd better back them up".

[_dain_]

How are normies supposed to know this?

[charcircuit]

Because it's happened before. Leafyishere had 5 million subs but his channel got deleted from getting 3 "bullying" strikes all at once.

[rootusrootus]

Things like this happen, get escalated to the media, and it creates public awareness of the risks of hosting digital content only in the cloud on servers that you don't own and don't even pay for.

In other words, the next generation of normies will probably understand this because of people before them learning the hard way.