Recovering A Deleted TikTok Draft: Guide For iPhone Users

TikTok is a great app for content creators, but it has one peculiarity that can cause problems for those who accidentally delete a draft video they still need.

Unlike most social media platforms, TikTok saves drafts locally on the phone’s app and not on the company’s servers. Here are the issues that can crop up:

• You can’t log on to your TikTok account on a different device and continue editing; the draft video won’t be there. You can only edit on the phone you used to create the draft.
• If you mistakenly delete the draft on your phone, or you later realize that you still need it to make changes or corrections, you can’t retrieve it on your phone or any other device. It’s gone.
• If you get a new phone, or you install a new TikTok version on your device, the drafts will no longer be available.

That’s certainly not great news. Thankfully, though, you may not be out of luck — if you’ve taken precautions.

Recovering a TikTok Draft on an iPhone

You may think there’s no reason to save your phone’s data to the cloud. Losing a critical TikTok draft, though, may change your mind. iPhone users who’ve chosen to use iCloud backup should be able to find their old drafts if they do a full phone recovery.

Be warned: this will take a while.

1. On your iPhone, navigate to Settings > General > Reset.
2. Choose “Erase all Content and Settings” and confirm.
3. After your phone restarts, choose to set it up as a new device.
4. During setup, there will be an “Apps and Data” screen. Choose “Restore from iCloud backup.”
5. You’ll be asked to sign into iCloud, where you should choose the most recent backup available.
6. When the recovery is complete and you reinstall TikTok, your drafts should be available.

If just re-recording the video isn’t difficult, that’s probably a better option than going through a full iPhone restore. However, this process may be necessary if you absolutely have to have the old draft. Bear in mind it will only work if you regularly save all of your phone data to the cloud; you can’t recover drafts recorded after your last backup.

Recovering a TikTok Draft on an Android Phone

Those who use Androids instead of iOS devices can follow the same basic process of doing a complete phone recovery, as long as they regularly save their data to a Google Drive backup.

The same cautions exist, though. Drafts and other data added to your phone after your last backup won’t be available, and the process of restoring a phone is time-consuming (and annoying).

Recovering TikTok Drafts from Your Camera Roll

This method of recovering drafts also requires forethought, and you have to diligently follow it to ensure that your draft videos are always saved. However, the recovery process is much easier and faster than a full phone recovery.

Whenever you finish work on a draft, save it to your camera roll. That way, it’s always available to be uploaded back into the TikTok editor until you decide to delete it from your phone’s storage. Unfortunately, it’s somewhat complicated to save drafts this way; TikTok makes you post the draft version before you can download it. 

Here’s what you need to do. When you’re ready to save the draft, make the video private (so no one else can see the half-finished work) and post it. Load the private video from your TikTok profile screen, click the three-dot “Share” icon, and tap “Save video.”

The draft is now on your camera roll. You can import the draft version from your phone when you’re ready to resume editing, and the private TikTok post can be deleted at any time.

This process will seem like a pain, especially if you create lots of videos. The first time you need to recover a TikTok draft, though, you’ll be relieved that you took the time to do it.