How Can I Watch Deleted & Private YouTube Videos? (2024)

We all have experienced frustration when one of our favorite YouTube videos has been deleted or went private, the one we added to the playlist or emailed ourselves (or someone else) to watch later for reference. You don’t have to be sad anymore, as here we will teach you how to find deleted and private YouTube videos effectively.

There are two possible ways to find and watch deleted and private YouTube videos:

The first method is for those scenarios when you have the exact URL to the YouTube video. For instance, you found a deleted video thumbnail in the list of videos that you have added to your playlist or a watch later list, it is somewhere in the email, or you found it in your watch history.
The second method is where you know the title but don’t have the exact video URL. For example, you remember the name of the song and artist and know that it used to exist on YouTube but now it’s nowhere to be found, so we will use a Google Search Operator technique to find that video’s URL.

Method #1: Watch Deleted/Private YouTube Videos Using a Wayback Machine

Whether the video has been deleted or its privacy has been changed to private, this method will allow you to watch the YouTube videos:

First, you need to find the URL of the YouTube video. So open the website where you last saw the video or maybe it was shared somewhere like on a social media channel or in an email. Sometimes videos added to our YouTube playlists are deleted or changed to private. For instance, I was scrolling through one of my YouTube playlists and found a video that no longer exists.
Once you have found the video, right-click on it and select the “Copy Link” option.
Open a new tab on any web browser and paste the URL into the address bar. Press enter to verify if the video is available or not. For me, it says, “video unavailable. This video is private.” You can check for yourself as well, here’s the video URL: https://youtu.be/watch?v=uTq8OvrAgYc
Now, we will go to the official website of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and will enter the YouTube video URL into the search box. Once done, hit enter.
The page will show you a yearly timeline with a graph and a calendar underneath with blue highlights on specific dates. We will recommend you to start with the oldest archive first as highlighted in the screenshot because there is a possibility that the recent snapshot might show you the same deleted or private video error message.
In this example, we are going to use the archived snapshot from March 10, 2018. There could be multiple snapshots, select the first one and see if it shows anything. If not, then try the second snapshot. One of them should work.
And once the page is loaded, you will figure out what the video was all about, it will show everything. For me, it was trap music uploaded by Trap Nation, and due to some unknown reasons, they have changed its privacy to private. However, the Wayback Machine allowed me to play the music video without any issues.

For those of you who are wondering if this actually works or not, simply try the steps we have mentioned in the guide above and search for the video URL we have included above in step #3. You will be able to see for yourself the true power of the Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive.

Method #2: Find Deleted/Private YouTube Videos Using Google Advanced Search

To be able to successfully watch a private or a deleted YouTube video, it is crucial to have its exact URL and if in case you are unable to find it in your playlist or email or anywhere else then this guide about Google advanced search and using search operators should help you out.

The steps are simple but the search may require some effort; here is what you need to do:

Open a web browser and go to Google.com.
In the search bar, you need to type in the Google search operator/formula i.e. site:www.abcwebsite.com + query
So, for a video titled “The Hum Party Thieves by Trap Nation” uploaded on YouTube, here’s exactly how the Google search query is going to look like:
1. site:www.youtube.com “the hum party thieves” “trap nation”
This helps us narrow down the search results and leads us to the exact video or sometimes the same video that has been uploaded by someone else. The same is the case with the video we are referring to here as you can see in the results that the first page is leading us to a video we are looking for but it is reuploaded by some other user named “valley”.
However, if in case you can find the exact URL to the original YouTube video, you can then use method #1 we have mentioned above to watch the deleted video on the Internet Archive.

This method does take multiple tries to find the exact Google query but once you have found it then Google will take you straight to the video or its original URL.

Did any of this work?

Out of the two methods we have mentioned here let us know which one worked for you to find and watch deleted or private YouTube videos. If in case the method didn’t work for you or if you are stuck somewhere then drop the details about your issue in the comments down below and one of our team members will help you out 🙂