Save your YouTube Videos to Google Drive

You have been uploading videos to the YouTube website all this time but you are now looking to explore additional channels. Maybe you can put them on other video hosting websites like Vimeo or your Facebook page to reach an even wider audience. You can bundle the YouTube video files as an iTunes podcast that people can download and watch offline.

The important point is how do you get your original video files from YouTube for uploading to other websites? If you have been diligently storing a backup of every single video file that you have ever uploaded to YouTube, please skip reading this, else there are two “official” options.

If you head over to the creator dashboard on the YouTube website, you can download any of your website with a simple click (read how-to). The only downside with the option is that YouTube downsizes your HD videos to 480p.

Also see: Save Web Files to Google Drive

There’s another option available inside Google Takeout that will not only let you download your YouTube videos in their original high-resolution but also saves the files directly to your Google Drive. Thus, you can start the download process and it will save all your files, big and small, to Google Drive in the background. Once the files are in Drive, they’ll automatically sync to your desktop that you can later upload to other video websites. To get started, go to this custom link, click the Next button and choose Add to Drive as your delivery method. That’s it. All you YouTube videos will be zipped and added to the Takeout folder in Drive in few hours. If the total size of your videos exceeds 2GB, it will create multiple files of 2 GB each.

An in addition to original videos, the zipped files from take will also include the video descriptions as well as all your playlists in JSON format.

Download YouTube Videos to Google Drive

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

0

Awards & Titles

Digital Inspiration has won several awards since it's launch in 2004.

Google Developer Expert

Google Developer Expert

Google awarded us the Google Developer Expert award recogizing our work in Google Workspace.

ProductHunt Golden Kitty

ProductHunt Golden Kitty

Our Gmail tool won the Lifehack of the Year award at ProductHunt Golden Kitty Awards in 2017.

Microsoft MVP Alumni

Microsoft MVP Alumni

Microsoft awarded us the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) title for 5 years in a row.

Google Cloud Champion

Google Cloud Champion

Google awarded us the Champion Innovator title recognizing our technical skill and expertise.

Email Newsletter

Sign up for our email newsletter to stay up to date.

We will never send any spam emails. Promise.