YouTube is without a doubt the largest and most used video-sharing platform that has ever existed – hands down. Whether it be funny videos, animal videos, short films, or movie reviews, the bottom line is that users can find content from all categories on the platform. But how much storage dos YouTube have?
What may have contributed to YouTube becoming a household name can be the fact that it allows every registered user to upload as many videos as they want on the website. Apart from that, there is another useful feature that YouTube offers: it lets users save their videos privately, so no one else can access them.
This is where another question arises, whether YouTube can be used as a video storage website since the platform apparently doesn’t provide any statement on how many videos an account can upload in private.
If that question has also crossed your mind, you’ve headed to the right article, as today we’re going to be having a deeper look into the amount of storage YouTube provides to every user and whether the platform itself has any limitations when it comes to its available space.
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How much storage does YouTube have?
A cool fact about the popular video-streaming platform is the fact that nearly 400 hours of video content is uploaded to it every minute. This might lead one to wonder where YouTube stores that big amount of data.
Well, when Google bought this platform in 2006, most of its data got transferred to Google Modular Data Centers, which is where you’ll find all your videos residing.
On paper, these data centers will have a lot of storage capacity, that is for sure. However, Google Modular Data Centers work together to provide the storage capacity that can easily meet the storage requirements of not only YouTube but other Google services as well, which include Gmail, Google Drive Google Photos, etc.
Moreover, Google frequently updates its data centers to be capable of storing more amounts of data, so there are very few chances of YouTube ever running out of storage space.
Using YouTube as video storage
YouTube doesn’t impose any limits on uploading videos. Taking that into account many people have thought about using the platform as their own personal video storage hub. If you have a similar interest, then we have some good news for you: YouTube can definitely be used as video storage.
There are mostly no limitations when it comes to uploading videos, so users can upload as many of them as they want even if they’re set as private or unlisted. However, there are still a few things that you should keep in mind, so you don’t end up losing your valuable data.
First of all, before uploading any video to your channel, you should make sure that it doesn’t violate the YouTube community guidelines. This is necessary as even your private videos can go through a filter and if the system detects a violation, not only can your video get removed but your account suspended as well.
Another thing to consider is that when you open a new account, it’ll only be able to upload videos that don’t span over 15 minutes or take more than 2 GB of memory. On the bright side, there’s quite an easy verification process that you can go through which completely eradicates this limit. This can be seen as there is a video on YouTube that spans over 596 hours.
So, once you’ve completely understood these two rules, there’s nothing stopping you from using YouTube as your own video storage. With that being said, we don’t really recommend it for storing your important videos, since there’s always a slight chance of account suspension which could lead to the loss of all your data.
Video storing alternatives
Considering that, your best bet is to go for alternatives such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or Backblaze to create backups. Although these options could cost you some money, there will be no risk of your data ever being deleted.
Wrap Up
Technically, it is definitely possible to store all of your video content on YouTube, since the video-streaming platform has unlimited storage and doesn’t restrict users from uploading as many videos as they want.
With that being said, it is not an optimal choice if you can’t take the risk of possibly having your account suspended in the future and losing your valuable data. So, your best bet is to spend a few bucks out of your pocket and opt for a cloud storage service or external hard drive for this purpose.
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