As an active TikTok user, I have been trying to ignore the impending reality of next week’s closure. While my fingers are crossed for a last minute save, and I still plan to try to use it after the 19th, yesterday I began the process of preserving all my data. If you’re a TikTok user, you should, too. Here’s how.
Download your likes, favorites, and follows
My three main concerns before the ban are making sure I have a list of people I follow, so I can follow them elsewhere, grabbing videos I’ve bookmarked since they probably had some utility, and saving my own videos. TikTok is the best place to start, since they have a built in feature that gives you all of that data as a document. You can request a data download of all your personal settings including your likes, followers, follows, bookmarks, and a list of your posts. Note: this does not include any actual videos; it’s more an inventory for you to work off of.
Credit: Amanda Blum
To request this data, go to your profile, and click on the menu from the upper right hand side. Go to Settings and Privacy > Account > Download your data. Note that you can select what types of data you want to download and what format you want it in (text file or JSON). A text file is more useful right now, since it will output your information in a format you can easily access, but having a JSON file might enable you to work with future utilities to help import follows and likes to another platform, so I recommend grabbing both formats of data. This means going through this exercise twice. Once for the text file, once for the JSON file (a computer language) to store in case some TikTok replacement can use it in the future to make importing follows or likes easy.
Once the file is ready, you’ll need to verify an SMS code sent to the phone number on record for the account to download the file. While you’ll likely conduct this operation on your phone, once you’ve downloaded the file, locate it in your file manager and click on “Share” and then email it to yourself.
How to save your own videos
The most painful (but cost effective) way to save your own videos is to simply visit each of them and download individually. Once the video is open from your profile, click the three dots in the lower right corner and select “Download Video.” If it sounds labor intensive, it is.
If you’re a confident coder with some JSON experience, you can use a free tool a TikToker built that they’ve open sourced on GitHub. You’ll need that JSON file for this method to work.
Credit: Amanda Blum
A simpler solution was Tokbackup, a web utility that you can use from your desktop. For $5 a month, you can download up to 6,000 videos for up to three profiles (higher priced plans allow for 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 your favorite videos, if you love one particular creator, this is a reasonable solution to grab all their videos to rewatch at home. Tokbackup took about ten minutes to grab all 100 of my videos, and I was pleased to see the data download included my most frequent hashtags, as well. Once the utility had grabbed them, you click on “download” to save a zipped file to your hard drive. For 100 videos, my file was almost 4GB, so you may want to find someplace in the cloud to park the file. Once downloaded, remember to cancel your account so you don’t get charged next month.
There are additional tools, like Repurpose.io, which will reportedly download all your videos for you, and even crosspost them to other platforms, but at a steep cost ($349 for the year).
How to save your favorited or liked videos
If you’d specifically like to grab videos from other people that you liked or favorited, you can download them individually, as noted above. However, I had luck using the MyFaveTT extension for Chrome, which is free.
Credit: Amanda Blum
Once installed, open it and connect to TikTok on the desktop. From there, you select whether you’d like to save your liked or favorited videos, and designate a location for them on your hard drive. This was a pretty seamless process, and over the course of an hour, all my bookmarked videos were saved. Depending on how many videos this is, it could take up hefty resources on your hard drive, so as above, you may want to have someplace online to park the videos until you need them.
Credit: Amanda Blum
While I wish there were one utility that would grab all the data and videos I want at once, piecing these methods together will result in getting all your content out of TikTok safely.
