Cloud storage no longer feels as limitless as it once did. I thought I'd never reach the limit on Google Drive, but after years of phone photo backups, I'm constantly having to clear space for storage. Those 15GB simply aren't enough for modern, high-quality video and image capture, let alone mass file storage. Of course, you can pay Google or another storage service for additional space. Alternatively, you could simply upload encoded videos to YouTube.
Data storage in video isn't new, but we've never seen it used to turn YouTube into your own free cloud storage service. DvorakDwarf managed to encode bytes into pixels to store data in YouTube videos just in time for World Backup Day next month, according to Hackaday.
Before we get into the details, DvorakDwarf makes it clear on their Github page that this isn't necessarily intended to be used as a mass storage solution. DvorakDwarf prefers that users think of this as a fun "party trick" and a way to learn about data compression. As a result, this YouTube storage solution contains some bugs that DvorakDwarf has no intention of fixing and likely violates YouTube's TOS.
The code is written in Rust and converts data into pixels, which are then played in video. It used to use the entire RGB spectrum of pixels, which allowed for much more efficient encoding. However, YouTube's compression went to town on the coloured pixels, so a binary mode was added and is recommended. It still has compression issues and is much bulkier and time consuming, but it produces a much more consistent result.
You could theoretically encode and upload virtually unlimited data to YouTube as information stored in pixelated videos using DvorakDwarf's programme. That being said, we wouldn't recommend it. As previously stated, these videos do not appear to be regular content and will be extremely easy to detect, even by YouTube's algorithms. Sounds like a simple way to lose all of your data when YouTube suspends your account.
It's also not very practical. Anyone who has had to upload large video files to YouTube knows how long it can take, let alone with all of the encoding on both ends. For the time being, it appears that we will have to stick to deleting old memories to make room for new ones.