AP 0484: Do I Need a Backup for My YouTube Videos?

AskPat 484 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody, Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 484 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

We have a great question today, from Andrew, but before we get to that, I do want to thank an amazing sponsor, one of my favorite apps on my iPhone, actually, and that is MileIQ. This is an app that will keep track of all the drives that you will take, and then after your drives, maybe once a week, go in there, and you either swipe left to record it as business drive, or swipe right as a personal, and it keeps track of your miles, which you can use as a write off. So, it's crazy, because the average MileIQ user, logs $547 a month in drive.

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Okay, check it out, thanks so much, and here's today's question from Andrew.

Andrew Palmer: Hi, Pat, Andrew Palmer, here from TheNorthlandNews.com. I bought a hyper-local news source, here in Kansas City, Missouri, that covers the county that I live inside of. I do a lot of video recordings of local school boards, and commission meetings, and much of that video gets edited and then, uploaded to YouTube.

I was curious, should I keep a digital backup of the files that I've already uploaded to YouTube, or is it safe to go ahead and just delete those, one they're uploaded? Thanks! Love all that you do.

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up Andrew, thank you so much for the question, today, I really appreciate it. To give you the quick answer, yeah, absolutely, I mean, what if YouTube goes under, or something happens to your account? You always want to keep a digital backup and to take that one step further, I would make a backup, or at least have that working file, that you use to edit that video, if there is one, for instance, I use Screenflow, which is a screen recording capture tool, although I use that for editing videos too, because it's just really easy to cut, and slice, and dice, and move things around and that. So I use that for editing.

I keep a Screenflow file for all of the videos I publish, because, not only because, just in case something happens to YouTube, or whatever, or with my account on YouTube, but if I wanted to easily grab that to upload it somewhere else, maybe in the course somewhere, maybe on another video website, Vimeo.com. I do that sometimes, for some things, for … I don't do that quite as often as I probably could. You could also do it to get an RSS feed for it, to turn it into an iTunes podcast, a video podcast, which I've done for SPI TV.

Here's the most important thing, what if you need to update some of that content? Maybe there's something that changed in it that you want to update, or maybe there's a promotion that you're running and you want to just add a trailer at the end for it, before you re-upload it, or something. You can't re-upload to the same video on YouTube, you're going to have to create a new video when you do that. That's something I wish YouTube would do, although I understand why they don't allow that. What I mean is, if you have a video, and is out-of-date, you create a new one, you just replace that video instead of having to create a whole new video, but it doesn't allow you to do that, unfortunately.

Like I said, it's good to have, just in case, and so yes, you should absolutely keep a digital backup of the files and also the working files, that you used to create that video too. It's going to take up a lot of space because a lot of those files, do run quite large, so for me, I have a one terabyte external hard drive that I use for all those things, including podcasts, too. So, I can keep my hard drive in my computer fast, and have some space on it for other things. So, Andrew, quick, short, easy answer, create a backup.

Andrew, thank you so much for the question, today, I really appreciate it, we're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For anybody else out there, that has a question that you'd like potentially featured here, on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com, you can ask right there, on that page, just hit the record button, ask your question, and fire away.

Thanks so much, I appreciate you. Here's a quote to finish off the day by, Malcolm Forbes, he said, “When you cease to dream, you cease to live.” So, dream big guys, and then you'll live big, thanks so much, I appreciate you, and if you have a sec, head on over to iTunes and leave a review for AskPat. I'd really appreciate it.

Cheers, bye.