Does Vimeo keep your original files?
Only if you pay, only if you switched it on first, and only while you keep paying.

This matters because the failure is silent. Nothing on the account announces that the master is gone. The video keeps playing, the thumbnail still looks right, the link still works, and the only moment you find out is the day a client asks for the file and you go looking for it. By then the setting cannot help you, because switching it on protects future uploads and does not restore anything already removed.

Read the plan and the setting together, not separately. A paid plan with the switch off is in exactly the same position as a free account: the source file is deleted. A paid plan with the switch on is genuinely safe while the payments continue, and Vimeo states plainly that if you store your source files you can download them at any time. The risk sits at the edges: the uploads you made before you knew about the setting, and the month the subscription stops.

Existence is settled by the four conditions above. Retrieval is settled by your plan. Vimeo restricts file download links from the API to Standard, Advanced, Pro, Business, Premium and Enterprise accounts, which is the only practical route when you are talking about a whole library rather than a single film. A Starter member whose source files are being stored correctly still faces a manual process, one video at a time, with a browser open and a download folder filling up. For fifteen videos that is an afternoon. For four hundred it is not a plan.

There is also a category of file where both answers are no permanently. Vimeo states that uploads made through an API integration with Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive before September 2016 cannot be downloaded regardless of settings. If part of your catalogue dates from that era and arrived through one of those connections, no upgrade recovers it. Anyone with a decade of work on the platform should check that group first, because it is the one where the answer will not change no matter what you pay.

The order of operations follows from that. Find out which plan you are on, because it decides whether bulk retrieval exists. Find out when you enabled source file storage, because it splits your library into a protected half and an unprotected half. Then pull the unprotected half first, since those are the projects where the best copy on the platform is a playback version and your own drives are the only remaining source of the master. Do all of that before you touch the subscription, not after.

uncompressed.io does not have the setting because it does not have the second copy. The player streams the exact bytes you uploaded, with no transcode anywhere in the chain. There is no derived playback version, so there is no original sitting behind it that somebody has to decide whether to keep. The file in your library, the file your client watches and the file you download back are all one file. That is an architectural difference, not a feature you enable.

The practical consequence is that there is no state your account can be in where the good copy quietly disappeared and the video kept working. There is also no upload you can regret because you had not found a checkbox yet. The trade is real and worth stating: browser decoding is what makes this possible, so H.264, HEVC and AV1 stream, while ProRes 422, ProRes 4444 and DNxHR are hosted for client download rather than streamed. Camera RAW is never streamed at all, and the honest workflow is to finish to HEVC or ProRes and upload that. An 8K file plays when the viewer’s own hardware can decode it, which is a fact about their machine, not a promise about ours.

If you are moving off Vimeo, the plan gate above becomes the whole story of how the move goes. The importer connects once, your library appears, and files move server to server without passing through your connection, with nothing re-encoded on arrival. It pulls originals when your Vimeo plan exposes API downloads, and the largest file Vimeo serves when it does not. Masters under 3 GB go across in one pass; larger masters run through a chunked, resumable job that survives a closed laptop.

The case for looking elsewhere is narrower than a comparison page usually admits. It is about the uploads that predate the setting, the accounts where nobody ever found it, and the moment a subscription lapses and a stored master becomes a file that may not be recoverable. It is also about what the viewer receives on the way through, which is a different question from whether an original is filed away somewhere.

And a warning that applies to every host on this list, including us. No video platform is a backup strategy. Your master belongs on drives you own, mirrored onto a RAID, with a copy somewhere that is not in the same building. A host is a delivery system and a place your clients can reach the work. If losing your account would lose you a project, the problem is not the host you chose. Get the local copy right first, then pick a platform on how it treats the file in transit and how hard it is to leave.

One more piece of fairness. A stored source file on a paid Vimeo plan is a genuine solution to a genuine problem, and Vimeo says outright that if you store your source files you can download them at any time. That is a clear commitment, published in the open, with no ambiguity in it. The criticism on this page is aimed at the default and at the conditions, not at the feature. A default of deletion turns an administrative oversight into a permanent loss, and a feature tied to a live subscription turns a billing lapse into the same thing. Those are design choices worth knowing about before you rely on them, which is the entire point of writing this down.