Everything lives in Google Takeout. Here is exactly what to select, how long it takes, and what arrives in the file.
The short answer
You download your YouTube data through Google Takeout, at takeout.google.com. Sign in, deselect everything except YouTube and YouTube Music, pick the categories you want such as playlists, liked videos, subscriptions and watch history, and Google emails you a zip file, usually within a few hours.
Google Takeout sits at takeout.google.com. It is a Google Account tool, separate from YouTube itself, so there is no export button anywhere on youtube.com or inside the YouTube app.
Sign in with the Google account tied to the YouTube activity you want. Takeout starts with every Google product selected. Deselect all of them first, then pick out YouTube and YouTube Music on its own.
This is the full path from opening Takeout to having a file on your computer.
Google quotes minutes to days, and YouTube data on its own tends to sit at the fast end of that range. Playlists, subscriptions and liked videos are lists of IDs and timestamps rather than video files, so they are small and typically land in your inbox within an hour, often in minutes.
Watch history and search history take longer with several years behind them, since that log grows with every video you have ever watched or searched for. Photos, Drive and Gmail exported in the same batch are the categories that actually stretch a request into days, so a YouTube-only export skips that entirely.
The email itself contains a download link, not the archive. That link expires after about a week, so grab the file promptly once it arrives.
Unzip the archive and you get a folder called Takeout, with a subfolder called "YouTube and YouTube Music" inside it. Each category selected during the export gets its own subfolder.
Playlists live inside a "playlists" folder, one CSV file per playlist. Your liked videos are in there too, in a file usually named "Liked videos.csv", even though it never shows up as a playlist inside the YouTube app itself.
Each row in a playlist CSV holds a video ID and the date it was added, not the video content. Turning a row into something watchable means building the URL yourself: youtube.com/watch?v= followed by that ID. Subscriptions arrive the same way, one CSV with a row per channel you follow.
Watch history and search history come as a single file rather than a folder, in whichever format was chosen during export, JSON or HTML.
The export is a record of what you liked, saved and watched. It is not a copy of the videos themselves. Liked videos, saved playlists and subscriptions all come through as lists of IDs, titles and timestamps, and the video content stays hosted on YouTube rather than inside the archive.
The one exception is content you uploaded to your own channel. Original video files for your own uploads are included when that category is selected. The videos other people made, the ones you liked or saved, are represented by a reference to them, not a downloadable copy.
That distinction matters for anyone planning to build a personal archive. A Takeout export tells you what you saved. It does not preserve the videos against deletion, and a creator taking a video down breaks the link the same way it would anywhere else.
A Takeout export answers "what did I save," which is exactly what most people come to this page for. The next question is usually "which one had the thing I remember," and a folder of CSV files with video IDs in it does not answer that.
Quiki reads your liked videos and playlists list, pulls a and an AI summary for each one, and indexes the words. Paste a link one at a time, or bring in the whole export at once with , filtered by date so you start with exactly the backlog you want.
The result works for YouTube Shorts as well as full-length videos, and it survives a creator deleting the original, since the and summary already live in your library by then. There is also a step-by-step video walkthrough of the desktop export flow, for watching it done rather than reading it.
Google moves the Takeout interface around occasionally. The steps and file structure on this page were checked against Takeout in August 2026.
| Takeout export | Quiki | |
|---|---|---|
| Every liked video and playlist in one place | ||
| Readable without opening a spreadsheet | ||
| Search by what was said in the video | ||
| AI summary of every video | ||
| Bring in your whole backlog at once | Manual CSV only | |
| Still useful after the creator deletes it |
Checked against Google Takeout in August 2026.
A CSV of video IDs proves you saved something. It does not help you find the one you had in mind.
Lectures and explainers get saved for one argument or one timestamp, and that detail lives in the audio, not the title.
People switching platforms, backing up a channel, or just tired of losing track of what they saved.
Start free. Paste a link, or bring in your whole Takeout export at once.
quiki.io