How to Stop Your Twitch VODs From Expiring

Twitch does not keep your past broadcasts forever. There is a retention window, it starts the moment you stop streaming, and when it runs out the video is gone — along with every clip you were going to make from it. Most people find this out the week after the stream they wanted.

Three separate settings decide whether a stream survives at all, and they are in different places. Here is the order to do them in.

First: make sure archives are even switched on

Storing past broadcasts is an opt-in setting, and an account that has never touched it may be throwing away every stream the moment it ends. In Creator Dashboard, open Settings, then Stream, and turn on Store past broadcasts. Nothing applies retroactively: this only affects streams from here on.

Second: know your actual deadline

Retention depends on your account. At the time of writing it is roughly two weeks for a standard account and about two months if you are a Partner, or have Turbo or Prime — but Twitch has changed these windows before, so check the current policy in your own dashboard rather than trusting a number in a blog post, including this one.

The important part is not the exact figure. It is that the clock starts when the stream ends, not when you last looked at it, and nothing warns you as it runs down.

Third: get the ones you care about off Twitch

Retention settings buy you time. They do not buy you a permanent copy, and there is no button labelled keep this one forever. Two things actually survive the deadline:

• Highlights and collections. A highlight made from a VOD is stored separately and is not subject to the broadcast retention window. Making a highlight of a whole stream is the closest thing to a keep button.
• A local copy. Exporting to your own disk, or to YouTube as a private upload, is the only version nobody else can expire.

Both of these require you to have decided the stream was worth keeping, which is the part that actually goes wrong. Nobody reviews six hours of footage on the off-chance.

The real problem: deciding what was worth keeping

A retention deadline is only a problem because reviewing a long VOD is expensive. If you knew there were four good moments at 0:41:12, 2:03:55, 3:48:01 and 5:12:30, saving them would take ten minutes. The reason streams expire unclipped is that finding out what is in them costs an evening.

This is worth separating out, because it changes what you should automate. You do not need a faster way to download VODs. You need a way to know which VODs are worth downloading before the clock runs out.

A workflow that survives the deadline

1. Turn on Store past broadcasts, once, and forget about it.
2. After each stream, run the VOD through something that finds the moments for you, so you have timestamps rather than six hours of video.
3. Highlight or export only the segments that came back interesting. Minutes, not hours.
4. Let the original expire on schedule. You already have what was in it.

The point of step two is that it is cheap enough to do every time. A review you only do for streams you already suspect were good will miss the ones you had forgotten about, which are most of them.