- Joined
- Jul 12, 2021
This incentivizes blocking VPNs, which more and more people are using out of necessity.
Preservetube - A Youtube archival site.
- Thread starter Breadbassket
- Start date
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2025
You're a nigger
OBL begs for donations on his shitty livestreams so I don't think he's in a financial position to do this unfortunately
Unpopular opinion: I think preservetube, while it has noble goals, has done kiwi farms more harm than good.
Let me explain. Before we had preservetube, people who wanted to archive a video would simply download it and upload it straight to the forum. Having the option to just archive a video like you would with a site page on archive.is doesn't really gain the benefits of being a neutral archiving platform, websites can be spoofed or have elements changed in it. It will be less likely to get someone to say a video is fake or had elements changed in it rather than a web page.
It gave us culture of just having a link to preserve tube and no local archival in the forum. Sure it alleviates pressure on website data, but we gain the fear of link-rot. And now when it becomes unsustainable, all those preservetube links are just gone, unless Null does something about it.
Let me explain. Before we had preservetube, people who wanted to archive a video would simply download it and upload it straight to the forum. Having the option to just archive a video like you would with a site page on archive.is doesn't really gain the benefits of being a neutral archiving platform, websites can be spoofed or have elements changed in it. It will be less likely to get someone to say a video is fake or had elements changed in it rather than a web page.
It gave us culture of just having a link to preserve tube and no local archival in the forum. Sure it alleviates pressure on website data, but we gain the fear of link-rot. And now when it becomes unsustainable, all those preservetube links are just gone, unless Null does something about it.
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2024
I don’t necessarily agree with this, but it’s an interesting point to bring up.
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2021
LTO storage is potentially an interesting idea, as somebody else mentioned. Obviously makes it less accessible, but means you aren't "losing" anything, just keep a proper inventory and any desired video can be retrieved as needed.
If I recall correctly, we paid something like $5 a TB last time we bulk ordered LTO tape. The drives can be a little pricey, but if you're willing to buy used not terrible (may have to settle for an older generation and a bit more $/TB though).
Don't get me wrong, tape is a pain. But you can store full quality copies and then prune unwatched videos (or replace them with much lower res versions) without losing the full quality if you want to retrieve it.
Hooked on phobics
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2023
If I can make a suggestion, maybe allow a selectable quality selection when preserving, or possibly downgrade certain videos? I'd rather have 480 p video's of plenty of stuff than have everything be 1080 but a storage crisis.
Hell I'd happily make a few videos 160p if they simply exist in any capacity.
Kokonut Kangs Klan
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2025
It can be pretty high latency. You'll have a limited number of read heads (maybe just one), a tape library robot needs to load/unload the desired tape, then the tape needs to seek to the correct position. Making the full library accessible to the web probably means implementing a queue/cache system to prepare videos for playback, making clients wait for the tape machine to physically service their request.
Maybe I'm missing something, I've only briefly used tape like this, but random access warm storage isn't its strong suit. Interesting idea though.
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2023
I'm not trying to come off as an asshole but what did you expect? It's meant to be a backup in case a video or channel gets nuked off the platform. Most people aren't going to go search out a video on PreserveTube unless you can't get it anywhere else.
There is also a massive amount of garbage that is archived on the site.
I don't know who Guest 7802 is but I'm guessing his Alarm Clock Vs The Humidity Blaster is something that doesn't need to be archived.
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2021
Agreed, to be clear I'm not talking about it being warm storage. I mean fully archived, not necessarily easily accessible (particularly by random users), so that apparent garbage can be purged or reduced in quality (size) without truly deleting it - would suck to delete something only for it to become relevant years down the line.
- Joined
- Sep 2, 2025
I don't know how databases work but I'm assuming it's a hardware costs, specifically HDD rising in prices. LTO storage is a meme, way too expensive (I looked into that for personal cold storage), so the uncomfortable position is to look at truncation (if you got processing power). As other users have pointed out, there is a lot of junk and non-risk content archived, so prioritization should be the first "option" to not have more costs added at the moment, maybe a score between subscribers, views and comment engagement justifying an archive. Maybe a percentage limit per channel (does a zero sub channel need to have 100 archived videos compared to chris chans channel)?
Maybe look into you having users login? Feels like bad actors might be archiving garbage to fuck with it. Many knows that KF users use preservetube and it's not out of question that certain groups would decide to fuck with it.
If multiple users requests the same video, then maybe it's worth a save compared to a single random user. In that way you can create a symbiosis with other places creating a concensus if the video is worth the save or not (KF users will try to archive the same thing in a thread will result in multiple accounts requesting the same thing in the same time span).
Maybe look into you having users login? Feels like bad actors might be archiving garbage to fuck with it. Many knows that KF users use preservetube and it's not out of question that certain groups would decide to fuck with it.
If multiple users requests the same video, then maybe it's worth a save compared to a single random user. In that way you can create a symbiosis with other places creating a concensus if the video is worth the save or not (KF users will try to archive the same thing in a thread will result in multiple accounts requesting the same thing in the same time span).
I always see this as an unavoidable thing, the philosophy of the Internet itself is "fast and compromised information", HDD's are build to not even last a decade (spec. wise). Printed paper (books) was the generational way to preserve information and before that we ingrained it in stones. The computers have no "archive" functionality at its core, it's really fragile and we are starting to see the really bad parts of it .
Radical take here, consider droping the frames by half. For a video to be 10-15 fps, not too bad for an archive version. It's an archive not a streaming service.
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Molokroid
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2022
I think the most important thing is that there needs to be a system to rate the importance or likelyhood of a video getting taken down.
Archives of the recent Minecraft classic leaks, Lolcow videos and 2nd Amendment content: High priority, important information that will dissapear.
Archives of large channels like GamersNexus, News channels or anything not in English: Low priority, waste of space and unlikely to DFE.
Anything in Hindi: Instant delete, IP ban and block the browser fingerprint.
You can see everything that anyone has downloaded with the service in the past 30 minutes here: https://ytdlp.online/download/
Also in the past week or so I have tried to archive a couple videos but I kept getting errors before the download process started (I was using a VPN).
Archives of the recent Minecraft classic leaks, Lolcow videos and 2nd Amendment content: High priority, important information that will dissapear.
Archives of large channels like GamersNexus, News channels or anything not in English: Low priority, waste of space and unlikely to DFE.
Anything in Hindi: Instant delete, IP ban and block the browser fingerprint.
I have seen what Indians, Russians and other Turd Worlders download using a similar service, ytdlp.online and sometimes it is truly sickening, but most often it is just pointless content.
You can see everything that anyone has downloaded with the service in the past 30 minutes here: https://ytdlp.online/download/
Also in the past week or so I have tried to archive a couple videos but I kept getting errors before the download process started (I was using a VPN).
Sure the HDDs themselves are not meant to last, but the information can always be transferred to new hardware without loss of information, only we the person has taken the precautions of backups and having RAID arrays for redundancy.
- Joined
- Sep 2, 2025
That's a duct tape solution for using HDD for "archive". You add maintenance and complexity for extending the information existence. Still, a fundamental technical flaw of modern tech. I won't sperg out more on this topic, but it's all a software/logistic cope for the physical medium itself not being built to last.
Was this you?
Memes aside, I still think prioritization and truncation is the solution.
daniel day
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 18, 2021
Replace all videos with stop motion cardboars cutout recreations. Im not sure how this will help, but Im sure it will.
Ted's Cabin
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Sep 6, 2024
This is retarded because the vast majority of Youtube videos do not get X million views (unless X is zero). You're basically describing a way to get rid of <1% of videos that most people are likely to be interested in.
You're never going to have enough storage to archive any substantial percent of Youtube, and the way you're choosing which subset of videos get archived is letting completely random people choose videos or entire channels. The actual videos that need to be archived should be high risk or have some meaningful commentary attached to it that would be worthless if the video were to disappear. You could solve your issue with a better selection strategy, which might just mean better users who aren't archiving literally every video they see for some reason.
More importantly: What percent of your storage is used by single uploads vs channel uploads? I would bet 90% of more of your storage is caused by people putting in entire channels, while people putting in individual videos are more selective and using a relatively small amount of your space. Consider making entire channel downloads subscriber only. If I want to download an entire channel I just pop it into yt-dlp, and if I want to reference a single video and make sure it's still around for readers later I'll use PreserveTube.
This literally doesn't matter at all because RAID exists. Anyone who cares about their data even a little is not going to let a single hard drive failure destroy their archives. The majority cause of link rot is that the data is being intentionally destroyed by sites like Youtube, or developers just don't care at all when reorganizing or redesigning their websites. It's not a hardware issue at its core. We could have perfect hard drives that never die and we'd have the same issue, except the storage would be maybe 10-25% cheaper without having to pay for drive redundancy.
- Joined
- Sep 2, 2023
I know nothing about archiving shit so take my comments with a grain of salt and feel free to call me a nigger.
1. Tape storage is the absolute cheapest option TB for TB, for example this 18 TB HPE LTO-9 tape costs $92.95 so each TB costs $5.16. The issue is that tapes are more similar to DVDs than HDDs in that tapes cannot be connected to a computer as is, they are manually inserted into a reader (worth thousands of dollars) which is then connected to your server. IMHO this is not a viable option because every time a video is read or written, you need to know on which tape it's stored and then insert it into the reader; there are robotic arms that do this automatically but I imagine they're even more expensive and slow AF.
2. Youtube transcodes every video people upload for compatibility and storage reasons so if you don't do so already, I think it'd be a good idea. Before uploading clips here, I always transcode videos to AV1 using svt-av1 with a fraction of the original bitrate and virtually the same quality. You can use a cheapo Intel card for hardware transcoding but software encoding compresses better and can be tinkered with. The waiting time for this process may deter people from uploading BS they don't really care about.
3. Idk what your philosophy regarding your site is, but perhaps you could delete music videos with static backgrounds since that's music and not a video IMO or alternatively store them as audio files with an embedded thumbnail to further save space.
4. Delete shit that nobody cares about. I'd just tell users that if nobody accesses a video in x period of time, it'll be automatically deleted in a way akin to unseeded torrents.
5. If push comes to shove, charge a small fee for archiving videos larger than some memory amount guaranteeing perpetuity at least until you decide to turn off the lights.
As already suggested, dump the quality down to 480, or even 360. Try to detect if something is a static image and if so, nuke it or strip it to audio only. Purging content kinda sucks since it would seem to defeat the point, but at least re-encoding videos that aren't being watched to take up less space should help. Even videos that are getting watched, so some of them really need to be in 720?
I've seen suggestions of charging, or tokens, or whatever. But how about charging to automatically archive channels? Few bucks to do it in 480, few more to do it in 720. And remove the page where people can look up a channel, see it isn't archived, and hit 20 links to archive everything.
Or, since tokens have been mentioned. Put up a page where people can review un-watched videos, and earn a token for determining if the video needs to be in 720p, or can be re-encoded at 480 or whatever, and allow people to use those tokens for priority archiving in 720, with normal archives being in 480. That'll encourage people to help you filter content that can get it's storage size reduced and provide an incentive to do so.
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2017
Shame it had to come to this.
I definitely agree that videos shouldn't be deleted from archive just because they're still on Youtube, or because they haven't been accessed on Preservetube. It's an archive, so it's kind of supposed to keep stuff in case it's needed. However putting them in some kind of slower cold storage seems reasonable. On trying to access a cold-stored video, check if it's still on YT, and if so maybe tell the user to go watch it there (or point them to Invidious if they're trying to avoid giving someone a view), and if it's been nuked then move it to the main storage.
Also yes IP block India. Not necessarily because it will improve anything, just on principle
I expect this is a bad time to ask about options for archiving age-restricted videos?...
I definitely agree that videos shouldn't be deleted from archive just because they're still on Youtube, or because they haven't been accessed on Preservetube. It's an archive, so it's kind of supposed to keep stuff in case it's needed. However putting them in some kind of slower cold storage seems reasonable. On trying to access a cold-stored video, check if it's still on YT, and if so maybe tell the user to go watch it there (or point them to Invidious if they're trying to avoid giving someone a view), and if it's been nuked then move it to the main storage.
Also yes IP block India. Not necessarily because it will improve anything, just on principle
I expect this is a bad time to ask about options for archiving age-restricted videos?...