How does download-archive work with private or deleted videos in a playlist?

[Kaos-Industries]

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Hey there. I've been using youtube-dl for a few years now to download my playlists from YouTube so I can listen to them offline, but I'm now looking into automating the process, and as a result, I'm wondering a few things about the underlying workings of youtube-dl.

I've been looking into the --download-archive switch as a method for backing up the latest videos from my YouTube playlists to a local drive, but a big motivation for me backing up the playlists in the first place is so I can stop losing YouTube videos that suddenly get deleted or made private, so I'm wondering - how exactly does --download-archive handle videos that have been deleted or made private?

Alternatively, if anyone experienced at automation with bash knows of a better method for doing what I'm planning to do here, I'm entirely open to it.

[dstftw]

What do you mean by handle videos? --download-archive has nothing to do with private or deleted videos. All it does is storing ids of downloaded videos in archive file and skipping videos with ids already present in this file.

[Kaos-Industries]

What do you mean by handle videos? --download-archive has nothing to do with private or deleted videos. All it does is storing ids of downloaded videos in archive file and skipping videos with ids already present in this file.

And how exactly do private and deleted videos factor into that? They are included when downloading a playlist with --flat-playlist, so it's a valid question to wonder whether they are also included in the archive file when using --download-archive.

[dstftw]

--flat-playlist does not download videos and has nothing to do with download archive.
Again: ids are included into download archive only after successful file download. If a video is deleted or unavailable then you can't download it thus can't store in download archive.