How to Save Everything You Love on TikTok Before It Disappears
As an avid TikTok user, I’m trying to ignore the looming reality of the shutdown next week. While I’m crossing my fingers for a last-minute save and still planning on trying to use it after the 19th, yesterday I started the process of saving all my data. If you’re a TikTok user, you should do this too. Here’s how.
Upload your likes, favorites and follows
My three main concerns before the ban: making sure I have a list of people I follow so I can follow them elsewhere, taking videos that I have bookmarked as they are likely to have some usefulness , and save your own videos . TikTok is the best place to start as they have a built-in feature that provides you with all this data in the form of a document. You can request to download data from all of your personal settings, including likes, followers, subscriptions, bookmarks, and the list of your posts. Note. This does not include actual videos; it’s more of an inventory that you can work on.
To request this data, go to your profile and click the menu in the top right corner. Go to Settings & Privacy > Account > Download Data . Note that you can choose which data types you want to download and in what format (text file or JSON). The text file is more useful for now as it outputs your information in a format that you can easily access, but having a JSON file may allow you to work with future utilities that will help you import follows and likes to another platform, so I recommend using both formats data. This means you need to do this exercise twice. Once for a text file, once for a JSON (computer language) file to store in case some TikTok replacement could use it in the future to make it easier to import follows or likes.
Once the file is ready, you will need to verify the SMS code sent to the account’s registered phone number to download the file. While you’ll likely do this on your phone, once you’ve downloaded the file, find it in your file manager, tap Share, and then email it to yourself.
How to save your videos
The most painful (but cost-effective) way to save your own videos is to simply visit each one and download them individually. Once the video opens on your profile, click the three dots in the bottom right corner and select “Upload Video.” If this sounds labor intensive, it is.
If you are a confident programmer and have some experience with JSON, you can use a free tool created by TikToker and open source on GitHub . You will need this JSON file for this method to work.
A simpler solution was Tokbackup , a web-based utility that you can use from your desktop. For $5 a month, you can upload up to 6,000 videos across three profiles (more expensive plans allow more profiles). You can use this utility to download all the videos of any profile, not just your own, so while it won’t save all of your favorite videos, if you love one particular creator, it’s a smart decision to get all of their videos to watch again. Houses. It took Tokbackup about ten minutes to fetch all 100 of my videos, and I was happy to see that the data download also included my most used hashtags. Once the utility has captured them, you click “download” to save the zipped file to your hard drive. For 100 videos, my file was almost 4 GB, so you may want to find a place in the cloud to park the file. After downloading, be sure to close your account so you won’t be charged for the next month.
There are additional tools like Refunction.io , which will reportedly download all your videos for you and even publish them to other platforms, but this will be expensive ($349 per year).
How to Save Favorites or Liked Videos
If you specifically want to get other people’s videos that you have liked or favorited, you can download them individually as above. However, I was able to use the free MyFaveTT extension for Chrome.
Once installed, open it and connect to TikTok on your desktop. From here, you choose whether you want to save your liked or favorite videos and specify a location for them on your hard drive. It was a fairly simple process and within an hour all my bookmarked videos were saved. Depending on the number of videos, they can take up significant resources on your hard drive, so as stated above, you may need a place online where you can park the videos until you need them.
While I wish there was one utility that could fetch all the data and videos I need at once, combining these methods will safely extract all your content from TikTok.