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by stevenicr 42 days ago
would be great if they could recover youtube playlists - I recently discovered that clicking to edit your playlist can turn into an oops deletion when you are off my a milliliter - and there is no 'are you sure delete' modal - it's just gone.

searching for 'recovery my deleted youtube music playlist' basically says find the url and go to internet archive and pray. Mine was shown in two IA pages, but clicking to view list was some 404 type error.
2 comments
archivarix 41 days ago
It is possible to restore playlists; they may also be found on archive.org and Common Crawl. But I hadn’t considered how necessary that would be. Regarding this specific case - unfortunately, neither Wayback nor Common Crawl has a single snapshot of the URL youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1RY5RYlgymo2ooWvReUmkwCCcGv0l_gF for the full list of 116 tracks.
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stevenicr 41 days ago
thanks for checking! I can see a big benefit in these being backed up, surely there are many others running into this issue.
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n1xis10t 41 days ago
I might not be able to help, but I’d like to give it a shot. Can I see the two IA links? If it was the “this page hasn’t been archived” error I’m less likely to be able to do anything, but I can check all the Common Crawl indexes and see if they have a copy of something useful.
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stevenicr 41 days ago
oh wow, hadn't even thought of that! I put the url wayback machine at top of this post:https://steveiscritical.com/05/youtube-ui-ux-fail-delete-acc...

It's the 'rook' playlist that got deleted, ( when trying to edit playlist to change not so great thumbnail. )

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n1xis10t 41 days ago
Unfortunately I got the same result that archivarix did above, nothing in CC and nothing in IA. The thumbnail had a different link than the title of the playlist so I thought I’d try that, but the wayback machine redirects to the first video on the playlist, and there’s nothing in the common crawl. I also checked the html just in case there was a track listing hidden in there, but there wasn’t.
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stevenicr 41 days ago
Really appreciate you taking the time and thinking of some alternative methods!

Not sure if there is a blocker from youtube in some way, but making backups of public playlists would certainly come in handy for a lot of people.

Seeing the articles and youtube videos and other articles about how to find your YT profile URL and searching the archive - obviously it's a thing bigger than I thought, and not something I ever considered.

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n1xis10t 41 days ago
I just thought to try putting “music” in place of “www” in the playlist url, but unfortunately IA and CC still have nothing.
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