ChannelBackup Desktop App

A free, open-source desktop app to back up your YouTube channel data to your local machine.

Built by The New Janky Workshop / VARØ Industries

🌐 Browser version (no install): channelbackup.app

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What It Backs Up

• Channel metadata (title, description, stats)
• Video metadata (titles, descriptions, tags, thumbnails, stats)
• Playlists and playlist items
• Comment threads (optional)

Everything stays on your machine. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Requirements

• Python 3.8+
• A Google Cloud project with the YouTube Data API v3 enabled
• OAuth 2.0 credentials (client_secrets.json) for a Desktop application

Setup

1. Go to Google Cloud Console → APIs & Services → Credentials
2. Create an OAuth 2.0 Client ID — choose Desktop application
3. Download the JSON file and save it as client_secrets.json in the same folder as the script
4. Install dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

5. Run the app:

python channelbackup.py

GUI Mode

Just run python channelbackup.py — a GUI will launch if tkinter is available.

CLI Mode

# Run a backup immediately
python channelbackup.py --cli --run-backup

# Specify output folder and include comments
python channelbackup.py --cli --run-backup --output ~/Backups --with-comments

# Set up scheduled daily backups
python channelbackup.py --cli --setup-schedule

Building Executables

Windows:

build.bat

macOS/Linux:

./build.sh

Requires pyinstaller — install with pip install -r requirements-build.txt.

License

MIT License — free to use, modify, and distribute.

Support

• Patreon
• Buy Me a Coffee
• Contact