Bring an existing archive¶

You do not need to start over. Channel Vault NAS can reconcile the two things many long-time youtube-dl / yt-dlp users already have:

media and sidecar files in a NAS folder
a --download-archive text file

The goal is to mark existing videos as archived before automatic backup is started, so they are not downloaded again.

1. Mount the existing folder¶

Point CVN_DOWNLOAD_HOST_DIR at the folder that contains your archive:

CVN_DOWNLOAD_HOST_DIR=/volume1/video/channel-vault

Then start or restart the Compose stack. Channel Vault never renames or deletes existing files during a scan.

2. Scan the NAS folder¶

Open Channels → Import kit → Existing NAS folder, preview the scan, and apply it. Media, thumbnails, subtitles, and info.json sidecars are indexed from disk.

Keep sidecars beside the video

video.info.json gives Channel Vault the strongest match. Files can still be recovered without it, but title-only matching is less precise.

3. Import archive.txt¶

Open Channels → Import kit → archive.txt, paste the file contents or choose the file, then preview the reconciliation. Review the recognized, duplicate, and invalid rows before applying it.

Common formats are accepted, including:

youtube VIDEO_ID
VIDEO_ID
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID

4. Verify before downloading¶

Open the channel. Confirm that Downloaded increased and Remaining only contains videos that are truly missing. Then choose the download interval and videos per run and click Start automatic backup.

Already downloaded videos are skipped in every later pass. If the database is lost, restore it from backup or scan the filesystem again; the media remains the durable archive.