YouTube Content Backup
Scheduled audio backups for channels and playlists you own or have permission to archive.
Problem
Content that matters can disappear, move, or become awkward to retrieve later. For permitted YouTube channels and playlists, I wanted a repeatable way to keep an audio backup without manually checking every source.
Approach
YouTube Content Backup is a small Bash and Docker project around yt-dlp, ffmpeg, jq, curl, and flock. It reads configured channels or playlist URLs, downloads new items, converts them to MP3, embeds thumbnails, saves cover images, and tracks what has already been downloaded.
The Docker setup runs once on startup and then follows a configurable cron schedule. A lock prevents overlapping runs when a previous backup is still working.
Result
The project turns content backup into a predictable container job. It can be run with mounted config, cookies, download, and log directories, which keeps the backup state visible and portable.
This is intended only for content I own or content I have permission to download.