Is Channel Vault NAS for me?¶
There is no single best YouTube archiver. Choose the workflow you want to live with on your NAS.
| Choose this when... | A strong place to start |
|---|---|
| You want a polished media server, search, playback, and a large established community | TubeArchivist |
| You want a focused subscription downloader with a mature, simple workflow | Pinchflat |
| You want channel subscriptions and filesystem-oriented downloading | TubeSync or ytdl-sub |
You already have NAS folders or archive.txt, want to inspect skip/missing decisions, value disk-first recovery, and want to track archived videos absent from the channel listing |
Channel Vault NAS |
Where Channel Vault is strongest¶
- importing an existing archive without deliberately re-downloading it
- making
archive.txtdecisions visible and reviewable - tracking archived videos absent from the channel listing, with local preservation counts and an exportable manifest
- treating the filesystem as durable data and the database as a rebuildable index
- combining channel sync, bounded automatic downloads, queue audit, and storage recovery in one operator console
Preservation Watch: keep checking after the download¶
On each sync, Channel Vault compares known videos with the returned channel listing. An absent video can be marked removed once the last recorded source sighting is old enough (24 hours by default). With a local archived-media record, it appears as preserved. This does not establish why it is absent or prove that no other copies exist.
- A Preserved count on the dashboard and on each channel, so rescue is a headline number, not a buried filter.
- A preservation manifest export (CSV or NDJSON) of recorded source absence and local preservation status, useful for reviewing your archive.
- No automatic deletion. A source disappearing is treated as a reason to keep your copy, never to prune it.
The default probe covers up to 500 uploads. Empty results and older videos outside a truncated listing's covered window are not treated as removals. The 24-hour threshold is measured from the last sighting, not from the first absent sync, so it is not proof of continuous absence. See the runtime limits.
Other projects evolve; compare their current documentation rather than treating this page as an exhaustive feature matrix. Channel Vault's focus is making source changes and local archive recovery visible in the same workflow.
Where another tool may fit better today¶
- You need a mature in-app viewing experience or a very large community.
- You need cookies or authenticated/private-video acquisition. Channel Vault does not currently expose a supported cookies workflow.
- You want the smallest possible downloader with few operational surfaces.
Channel Vault is intentionally an archive operations console, not a replacement for Plex/Jellyfin and not a promise to bypass source access controls. It is for content you own or are authorized to archive.