Is YouTube a good way to store personal videos on the long run?
Solution 1:
Setting aside whether it's "right" or not in the moral sense, let's look at the practical side of things and ask "Does it make SENSE to store my videos on YouTube?"
I'd say no, for several reasons.
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YouTube may change their terms of service at any time and may even lay claim to any uploaded content as their own. They could decide to remove any videos not accessed within the last xx years, for example.
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YouTube downsamples your videos when you upload them, so if you rely solely on them for storage, you'll never get back the full resolution original video.
Alternatives:
One or more free OneDrive/Dropbox/Box/etc accounts will give you quite a bit of storage. All of them treat your files AS files; they don't change them, downsample them or the like.
Add another hard drive. The price of small, portable external drives is quite reasonable ... US$85-125 roughly for a 4 terabyte drive. Internal drives are even cheaper, if your PC has spare drive slots and you're ok with installing a drive yourself. And saving to a drive will be WAY faster than uploading to any cloud storage space.
Solution 2:
Is YouTube a good way to store personal videos on the long run?
You have no control over YouTube and no guarantee what they'll do in the future. YouTube is a private company and has no obligation to you personally, especially if they provide a free service to you.
A service should never be the only place where any important media meaningful to you should exist. However it wouldn't hurt to keep them on YouTube as well, just make sure it's not the only place.
I'm pretty sure if you view your private videos on YouTube, or share them with people you'll know, you'll still see ads, so you aren't stealing anything from YouTube by doing what you want to do IMHO.
Buy an external hard drive and keep them there. Things like the 3-2-1 backup strategy can help protect against data loss from personal disasters/catastrophes.
Solution 3:
It is NOT. Even with the current terms you're not safe, for example (emphasis mine):
We may also need to alter or discontinue the Service, or any part of it, in order to make performance or security improvements, change functionality and features, make changes to comply with law, or prevent illegal activities on or ABUSE OF OUR SYSTEMS.
You never know if YouTube will suddenly decide to interpret that storing of terabytes of data as private videos is using the service as local storage and therefore an abuse.
Furthermore (emphasis mine):
...there will be times when we need to make such changes WITHOUT NOTICE, such as where we need to take action to improve the security and operability of our Service, prevent abuse, or meet our legal requirements