We post a lot of content on the Internet, whether they be tweets on Twitters or pics on Flickr. We also upload a lot of videos on YouTube, but is there any way to get them back? Now you can with something called Google Takeout.

Say that you uploaded some of your best videos onto YouTube, but your computer hard drive crashed and you lost the original files. Up until now, you could only go into the YouTube Video Manager and download the transcoded MP4 files that have already been processed by Google. That’s mostly okay, but it’s even better if you can get the real original file that you uploaded in the first place, especially if you want to do any additional editing.

That’s the good news. The bad news is, as far as I can tell, you can’t cherry-pick which original videos you want to download, because Google Takeout is configured to download everything that you have with any particular service. In my case, and I don’t consider myself to be a heavy YouTube uploader, Takeout is telling me that I have 255 estimated files with an estimated total size of 27.5GB. That’s pretty hefty, but at least we now have that option.

Head over to Google Takeout now and download your own original YouTube uploads. How big is your estimated total size?

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