💾How to Export and Backup Your YouTube Subscriptions

What 'exporting subscriptions' actually means

When people say 'export my subscriptions', they usually mean one of two things:

• A list of the channels they currently follow — typically channel name and channel ID — saved as a file.
• A way to re-subscribe to those channels later (on a new account, in a different app, or after an accidental mass unsubscribe).

Google's official tools cover the first case directly. The second case is partially supported and partially manual, depending on where you want to re-import.

Method 1 — Google Takeout (recommended)

Google Takeout is Google's official data export service. It exports your YouTube subscriptions as a CSV file alongside any other YouTube data you choose to include (playlists, watch history, comments, etc.).

How to export with Google Takeout

1. Visit takeout.google.com while signed in to the Google account you use for YouTube.
2. Click 'Deselect all' so you can pick only the data you want, then scroll down and check 'YouTube and YouTube Music'.
3. Click the 'All YouTube data included' button on that row. In the dialog, deselect everything except 'subscriptions' if all you want is the channel list. Save your selection.
4. Continue to the next step, choose your delivery method (download link by email is the simplest), file type (ZIP), and frequency.
5. Submit the export. Google emails you a download link when the export is ready — usually within minutes for a subscriptions-only export.
6. Download the ZIP and extract it. The subscriptions file is a CSV located under the YouTube and YouTube Music / subscriptions folder.

The resulting CSV typically contains channel ID, channel URL, and channel title for every channel you are subscribed to. That is enough to reconstruct your subscription list manually or with a script.

Method 2 — Save the Manage Subscriptions page

YouTube's Manage Subscriptions page at youtube.com/feed/channels shows every channel you are subscribed to in one scrollable list. It is not as clean as a Takeout export, but it works as a quick visual reference or as a starting point for a manual cleanup.

Scroll all the way down to load the full list, then use your browser's Save Page As feature, or take a series of screenshots, or copy the visible channel names into a document. The result is not machine-readable in the way a CSV is, but it is fast and requires no setup.

Method 3 — RSS feed per channel

Every YouTube channel exposes an RSS feed at youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID. This is not a backup of your subscription list itself — it is a way to track a specific channel's uploads outside of YouTube. Useful when you want to keep watching a creator from an RSS reader without depending on YouTube's bell or feed.

Combine with Takeout: export your subscription CSV, get the channel ID column, and build RSS URLs for any channel you want to track via RSS. This is the closest thing to an OPML-style 'feed bundle' of your subscriptions.

What about OPML?

YouTube used to offer an OPML download of subscriptions years ago. That feature has not been part of the current YouTube interface for a long time, and re-routing the data through Takeout (CSV) plus per-channel RSS URLs is the practical replacement.

If your goal is to load the subscriptions into an RSS reader, write a small script or use a converter tool to turn the Takeout CSV into an OPML file that the reader can import. The data exists; it just is not in OPML format out of the box anymore.

After the backup: reorganize before re-importing

A backup is the perfect moment to clean up. If your subscription list has grown unwieldy, the export gives you a flat view of every channel — a much easier surface to triage than YouTube's UI. Open the CSV in a spreadsheet, scan for channels you no longer care about, and make a 'keep' list before doing anything else.

Once your subscription list is back to something you actually want, use FolderTube to organize it into folders so a future audit is even easier.

Setting up FolderTube after a re-import

1. Install FolderTube from the Chrome Web Store.
2. Open YouTube and click the purple FolderTube button in the top-right of the page to open the sidebar.
3. Press the sync subscriptions button to import your subscribed channels.
4. Create the folder structure you want and drag channels into the matching folders.
5. Open the Subscriptions page and use the folder tabs to view videos one folder at a time.

How often to run a backup

Google Takeout supports scheduled exports — every 2 months for up to a year — which is enough for most people. A more frequent cadence is rarely useful unless you are constantly adding subscriptions and want a finer-grained history.

For most users, a quarterly Takeout export plus a one-time alignment with your folder structure is enough to recover from almost any account-related issue.

What to read next

For the broader cleanup process after a backup, see the playbook for managing too many subscriptions. For starter folder templates to drop your channels into, see the topic-based grouping guide.