how can youtube recover channels that were deleted by hackers if deleting a channel deletes the videos “permanently”?
In: Technology
two major ways.
first of all when they tell you videos will be permanently deleted that does not actually mean that this is happening, they just want to make sure people know they have no way to recover these videos on their own.
beside this Youtube has backups of their data and will simply be able to restore the majority of data from these backups if everything else fails.
I’m a systems administrator for a larger manufacturing company. What we do is create backups of all important data. Backups are generally kept in multiple locations and are in completely separate systems from our live data. In the event of losing data to hackers or any other major issue we can simply restore the data from backups. We got hit several years ago and hackers wiped out a large amount of our date. Myself and my team had us back up and running within 24 hours.
almost nothing is ever truly deleted “permanently”
If I were implementing Youtube, I wouldnt delete anything permanently for like, 5 years. I would give a “delete permanently” button, and customer support wouldnt be able to restore your “deleted” file, but we would keep an archived copy just incase there is some sort of trial we need it for.
An example would be, say your channel uploads Disney movies, once an hour, every day and then “deletes” them. Eventually the DMCA is going to notice, and give us a takedown request. We can then take that, and look at all the videos uploaded by this user, even the “deleted” ones to decide if this was a 1 time fluke, or if your channel is a serial offender in need of a ban.
Just assume all content you post on anyone else’s server is cached in the same way.
If a hacker takes over an account and tries to delete it, no worries m8, we never actually deleted anything.
And as someone else mentioned, sites like youtube use distributed and redundant data backups. If a large client is every truely taken down, its not impossible to restore from a backup.
Youtube’s like a magical library. Even if a naughty goblin rips a book apart, the librarian can put it back together with her special recovery magic!
Backups, and sometimes, systems do not delete the data directly, but only flag it as deleted in their databases. The software might actually delete it during a scheduled clean-up or if other requirements are met. Database design can be tricky:
Imagine you count all eggs in the supermarket using a database. Lets say you have counting devices on the shelves and in each shopping cart. Then you want to remove eggs from the supermarket’s inventory.
You can remove all eggs from the shelves, so no new eggs end up in the shopping carts. But you shouldn’t delete the entry in the database yet, because some eggs might still driving around in the shopping carts. The counting devices would get an error if the want to update the number of eggs if the entry is directly removed, the database would say “Eggs? I don’t have an entry for that!”. So you have to design some rule like “Delete entries from the database only after ALL shopping carts passed the cashier, are therefore empty and therefore no eggs are in shopping carts anymore” to keep the database going without errors.
No such thing as permanent on the internet. More a question of how much effort it is to retrieve it.
To put it bluntly, YouTube is lying and they do not permanently delete the videos. They probably say they do to cover themselves if a video gets deleted and they *can’t* recover it.
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