Find a Reupload of a Deleted YouTube Video

When a YouTube video is gone from YouTube and the Wayback Machine has no copy of the file either, the only way left to watch it is to find a reupload — a copy someone else republished elsewhere. Tube Search runs that lookup automatically on the platforms where mirrors actually show up, and lines up one-click manual searches for the rest.

Find Reupload page showing automated matches across Archive.org, Dailymotion, and RuTube, with confidence buckets Find Reupload page showing automated matches across Archive.org, Dailymotion, and RuTube, with confidence buckets
1
Open Find Reupload for a deleted video
On any deleted row in search results, click "Find reupload". If you already have the ID, go straight to /find-reupload/<videoId>.
2
Use the copied metadata
The header shows everything we recovered for the original video — title, channel, duration, upload date, view count, description, tags — with a copy button next to each field. The thumbnail comes from web archives once YouTube stops serving it, so the page rarely looks empty.
3
Let the automated search run
Below the metadata, the Automated search section probes several platforms in parallel:
  • Archive.org — direct lookup of youtube-<videoId> (perfect hit when present)
  • Dailymotion — title search, candidates scored by duration and channel match
  • RuTube — same heuristic, stronger for Russian-language content

Pills update as each source finishes. Green with a count means matches were found; gray "Done" means the source returned nothing.

4
Pick a confidence bucket
Matches are grouped by how sure we are that it is the same video:
  • 🟢 Full reupload — exact ID on Archive.org, or a mirror on the same channel with identical title and duration
  • 🟡 Likely — title similarity ≥ 85%, duration within ±5 seconds
  • 🟠 Possible — verify yourself — loose match (title ≥ 70%, duration ±10 s). Worth opening, but confirm it is the right video before sharing.
5
Use manual search for the rest
The Search manually row pre-fills the original title into every other place worth looking — Google, Google Video, Yandex, VK, DuckDuckGo Video, Archive.org, Dailymotion, RuTube — and adds a Reverse image search button that runs the thumbnail through Wayback so the lookup still works after YouTube drops the image.
Reverse image search works best for music videos and viral clips — a distinctive frame finds reuploads more reliably than the title alone.

Daily Quota

Each open of /find-reupload/<id> burns one quota unit, including re-opens that hit the cache. Limits are admin-tunable and refresh from the database below:

The quota resets every day at 00:00 UTC. Cached results come back instantly without re-probing the external platforms, but still cost one unit.

Find Reupload only runs for deleted videos. Live videos already have a working YouTube link, so the button is hidden.

Why Not Just Search YouTube?

YouTube's own search only indexes what is on YouTube right now. Once a video is removed, the search returns nothing — even when an obvious mirror lives on another uploader's channel. The platforms we probe each behave differently: Archive.org keeps community-uploaded copies, Dailymotion attracts mirrors of music and viral content, and RuTube hosts plenty of Russian-language reuploads that never get the DMCA strike that took the original down.

Re-check Stale Results

Results are cached for around 30 days per video. To force a fresh probe — for example, when a new mirror appears later — use the Re-check button at the bottom of the page.

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