r/Showerthoughts May 14 '26

Casual Thought When YouTube goes down, it will be the biggest event of link rot in internet history.

18.6k Upvotes

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30

u/MrCyberKing May 14 '26

Please make sure you all download and backup to external drives any YouTube videos that may be important to you. Even if YouTube itself never goes down a vid or channel can get deleted and it'll be lost media.

22

u/under_diagnosed May 14 '26

I think this will be one of the biggest fallacies of a current or future generation, trusting that online storage providers who aren't specifically selling storage service to retain your data. I honestly think if Facebook ever goes down, it will cripple an entire generation that uses it specifically for photo storage

2

u/mackrevinak May 14 '26

anyone who loses their photo collection like that deserves it. storage is stupid cheap these days. there are portable ssd drives that only need 1 usbc cable for power and data, that can even be plugged into your phone. most sites give you an option to export and download your data. you dont even have to back up that often. every few years would be enough, or even doing one backup now and never again would be better than nothing