Not everyone posts all the videos they shoot and edit on TikTok. One of my friends has more than 100+ drafts on her TikTok account.
Some will have good videos as drafts and may plan to post them in the future. But many wonders if draft videos will get deleted if they delete or uninstall TikTok.
Many people have reported losing all their drafts on TikTok out of the blue.
In this article, I will explain in detail what will happen to drafts on TikTok when you delete the app, log out from the app, uninstall the app or log in to the same TikTok account on a different phone.
If I Delete TikTok What Happens To My Drafts
If you delete the TikTok app from your phone, all the drafts will get deleted. The draft videos on TikTok are not directly stored in the cloud. Drafts are linked to your phone. When you delete the TikTok app, draft videos get deleted along with it.
Not many people know that the TikTok draft video gets deleted when they delete the TikTok app from their phones.
The same is the case with both Android and iOS.
I downloaded TikTok on my iPhone and an Android phone to test and verify it. I saved a few videos as drafts on both phones and uninstalled the app. Later, I reinstalled TikTok back to my phone.
After logging into the app and checking the draft section, I could not find any previous draft videos. All drafts were deleted.
In short, all your data draft videos get deleted when you delete TikTok app from your phone.
You might wonder why the draft gets deleted when you uninstall or delete TikTok.
The drafts get deleted along with the TikTok app because none of the draft videos are saved on TikTok servers. All the draft videos on TikTok are locally stored on your phone’s internal storage.
This is the reason why you are not able to find draft videos created on one phone on a second phone even though you are logged into the same account.
But things are a little different when you log out of the TikTok app. Find more on this below.
If I Log Out Of TikTok Will It Delete My Drafts?
Drafts won’t be deleted when you log out of TikTok. Once you log in again, you can find all the draft videos in the Drafts section of the TikTok app.
For many reasons, people want to log out of TikTok. Many are concerned that all the draft videos will get deleted if they log out of the app.
I tried logging out of my TikTok account on my iPhone and Android. After logging in to my TikTok account, I found all the draft videos on my iPhone and Android devices.
You can safely log out of TikTok and log in again to find your draft videos.
But make sure you do not uninstall TikTok after logging out. Uninstalling TikTok from your phone will delete all the draft videos. You won’t be able to get your videos back even if you install it again and log into TikTok.
Out of curiosity, I tried logging in to my TikTok account on a different phone. But this time, I could not find the draft even though I successfully logged into the same TikTok account on an other phone.
If you want to gain access to your drafts after logging out of your account, you should log in on TikTok using the same phone; otherwise all your draft videos will get deleted.
TikTok is not a perfect app in any way. Many people have reported they lost their draft videos after logging out of it. Similarly, many people cannot favorite videos or like videos on TikTok either.
How To Retain Drafts After Deleting, Uninstalling TikTok or Switching Device
Managing draft videos on TikTok is a pain. Since the videos are locally stored, accessing the same on other devices becomes impossible.
But luckily, there is a workaround to make some videos available to you on every device.
There may be specific videos that you don’t want to post on your TikTok profile but want to watch it.
TikTok provides an option where you can set who can view a video.
So all you need to do is publish the video, but select ‘Who can view this video’ as “Private”
This way, the video will be published, and you can view it, but no one else can see them.
Does Updating TikTok Delete Your Drafts?
TikTok drafts won’t get deleted when you update the app directly from the App Store or Play Store.
As TikTok drafts are not stored in the cloud, many people wonder if the video drafts get deleted if they update the TikTok app.
Fortunately, TikTok won’t delete your drafts if you update the app directly from the Play Store or App Store.
You might have noticed that you won’t get logged out of your TikTok account when the app updates. When an app is updated, all your data remains on your phone.
But if you update the app after uninstalling it, your draft videos will be lost.
Can I Access Drafts On TikTok On Multiple Phones?
No. Since TikTok drafts are locally stored on the user’s phone, you cannot find the drafts created on the phone on a different phone.
Many of us have multiple phones. I use three smartphones. I use an iPhone as my daily driver and Samsung and Google phones as secondary Android devices.
I have logged in to the same account on all my phones. But when it comes to TikTok, I cannot find the draft video created on one phone on the other one.
Let’s say I created and saved a draft video on TikTok on my iPhone. If I open TikTok on my Android device, I won’t be able to find the draft video.
You cannot find your draft video on multiple devices because the draft is locally stored on your phone. Many people think drafts are stored on TikTok servers. But drafts are actually locally stored on the users’ device.
Can I Recover Deleted Drafts On TikTok?
You cannot recover a draft on TikTok once it is deleted. It doesn’t matter if you manually deleted it from TikTok or if it got deleted when you deleted the TikTok app, you could not get it back.
As you might know by now, TikTok draft videos are locally saved on the user’s device. It is not uploaded to the TikTok server unless published. For the same reason, if the video is deleted from your phone, there’s no way to get it back.
Many people suggest using file recovery apps to get TikTok drafts back. But you can’t get them because they were not directly stored on your phone in the first place.
To avoid accidentally deleting and losing drafts on TikTok in the future, I suggest you take a backup and store it in the cloud. This way, even if you somehow delete the draft, you can easily retrieve it via the backup.
How To Download TikTok Drafts
If you plan to switch your phone or uninstall TikTok, you must download the TikTok drafts. Otherwise, they will be deleted when you uninstall the app.
There is a little workaround by which you can download TikTok draft videos directly to your phone gallery. You don’t need to use any third-party app for this trick.
Follow the steps below to save TikTok drafts to your phone gallery or photos app.
Open TikTok
Find the draft video that you want to download.
Tap the “Who can view this video” option and set it as Private.
Now enable the Save to Device option.
Finally, tap the Post button.
TikTok will publish your video, but no one will see it since the visibility is set as Private.
You will now find the TikTok draft on your phone’s gallery or the Photos app.
Disable This Option Now – iPhone Users!
If you are an iPhone user and have enabled the option to free up space by deleting apps that are not used often, you should disable it immediately.
The Offload Unused Apps feature on iPhone will delete apps not used within the last few days.
If you do not use TikTok often, there is a chance that the iPhone system will automatically delete the app to free up space.
For example, let’s say you have turned on the option where it will automatically remove unused apps. You didn’t use TikTok for many days and had many drafts inside the app. iPhone will automatically delete the app to free up some space.
The next time you tap the TikTok icon, your iPhone will download it from the App Store. But after logging in, you will see all your drafts are deleted.
To ensure this does not happen, you must turn off the ‘Offload Unused Apps’ option.
Follow the steps below to turn off the offload unused apps feature on iPhone.
Open iPhone Settings.
Tap App Store
Scroll down and disable ‘Offload Unused Apps.’
What’s Next?
By now, you might have understood how important it is to properly store your TikTok draft and take a backup if necessary. If you lose your phone, your TikTok draft will forever be gone.
Since TikTok drafts are locally stored on the user’s device, there’s no way to recover them. You must either publish them and set them as private to upload them to the TikTok server or take a backup.
Lastly, if you are an iPhone user, ensure the ‘Offload unused apps’ option is turned off, as it may delete the TikTok app, which may end up deleting all the drafts.
If TikTok opens an Instagram link on Safari, follow our guide to fix it.
