a TorrentFreak article got me spooked so I fired up the ol’ yt-dlp. Got the entire channel, including comments, description metadata, and thumbnail images.
A significant number of videos were actually unavailable because of an odd YouTube bug where 15+ year old videos were listed as “currently being processed”. I may re-run this later (since I ran it in archive file mode) to get the missing videos, as it seems there may be about 300 out of 4911 videos missing.
Just upload it to archive.org before your backup dies. No need to hoard it for yourself.