How to Back Up Your YouTube Watch Later and Liked Videos
Your YouTube playlists are full of deleted videos you'll never get back. Here's how to back up your Watch Later, Liked Videos, and custom playlists before more disappear.
Open any YouTube playlist you’ve had for a few years. Chances are you’ll see entries like [Deleted video] or [Private video] scattered throughout. Each one was something you saved — and it’s gone without any notification.
YouTube doesn’t let you export or back up your playlists. The only way to protect them is to download the actual videos to your computer.
The problem with “Watch Later”
YouTube’s Watch Later playlist and Liked Videos list are private playlists tied to your account. Unlike public playlists, they have a unique complication: most download tools cannot access them without your account credentials, because YouTube hides them behind authentication.
You have two options: download them through an authenticated tool, or first copy the videos to a public/unlisted playlist and then download that.
Option 1: Download directly with authentication
Using TubeArchiver
- Enable browser cookie integration in TubeArchiver’s settings (select your browser)
- Go to YouTube and copy the URL of your Watch Later or Liked Videos playlist
- Paste the URL into TubeArchiver and start the download
Because TubeArchiver uses your browser session, it can access your private playlists just like your browser can. Videos are organized into folders automatically, and duplicates are skipped if you’ve already downloaded some of them.
Using yt-dlp
yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser chrome -o "%(playlist_title)s/%(title)s.%(ext)s" "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=WL"Replace WL with LL for your Liked Videos playlist. The --cookies-from-browser flag authenticates the request using your browser session.
Option 2: Copy to a new playlist first
If you don’t want to use cookie authentication, you can manually select all videos in your Watch Later list, add them to a new unlisted playlist, and then download that playlist with any tool.
This works, but it’s tedious for large playlists and creates an extra step every time you want to update your backup.
How often should you back up?
Videos disappear from YouTube every day. A reasonable schedule:
- Weekly if your Watch Later list grows quickly
- Monthly for Liked Videos and curated playlists
- Immediately if you spot a video from a small creator or a channel that might not last
Both TubeArchiver and yt-dlp support incremental downloads — they only grab videos you don’t already have. Running a backup takes seconds if nothing new has been added.
What you can’t recover
If a video is already showing as [Deleted video] in your playlist, it’s gone. No tool can download a video that YouTube has already removed. The title, the thumbnail, the content — all erased. This is why backing up before things disappear is the only strategy that works.
Start now
Pick the playlist you’d miss the most and download it today. It takes less time than you think, and the alternative is watching more entries turn into gray [Deleted video] placeholders.
Want to go further? Learn how to download an entire YouTube channel or see what happens when a channel gets deleted.