How to Save Your TikTok Videos and Data Before the Ban
The viral video app may go dark for U.S. users on Jan. 19. Here's how to download your saved and shared content.
If you’ve yet to get hooked on TikTok, your brain might be better for it. But if you’re like me and the 170 million other American TikTok users who regularly spend hours scrolling the viral video-sharing app, you might currently be scrambling to salvage your favorite saved and shared videos before the platform goes dark.
The TikTok ban goes into effect this Sunday, Jan. 19, barring an eleventh-hour decision to block the law’s implementation or to push back the deadline. Citing national security concerns, Congress passed the ban last spring. The law now requires TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app or else have it barred from U.S. markets.
How to Download TikTok Videos
Saving individual TikTok videos is straightforward and the easiest way to ensure you have ongoing access to them. However, this process becomes tedious—and eats up storage space—if you have lots of videos you want to save. You could potentially rely on an external hard drive or additional cloud storage, if lots of videos are important to you.
To save a TikTok on your phone: Open the video and click on the three dots at the bottom right of the screen—or if it’s another user’s video, the arrow icon in the same spot—and select Save Video. This saves the video locally to your phone’s photo library.
Graphic: Consumer Reports Graphic: Consumer Reports
To save a TikTok on your computer: Right-click the video and select Download Video. This saves the video to your computer as an MP4 file.
How to Download Your TikTok Data
You can request all your personal data from TikTok, including all the videos you’ve posted and favorited. To do so, go to your profile and tap the menu icon at the top right. From there, go to Settings and Privacy > Account > Download Your Data. Under “Request data,” you have the option to request all of your personal data or specific categories of data.
If you request all your data, you’ll receive a zipped file of documents that include links to all your own posts and the posts you’ve favorited; a list of your followers and the accounts that you follow; your personal account information; all your activity, including likes, comments, and browsing history; and messages, which include all the DMs you’ve sent and received.
When I put in the request, my data was available within just a few minutes, but keep in mind that it can take days or even weeks to get it back, which could put you past the Jan. 19 deadline. You can check whether your data is available by returning to the Download TikTok Data page and selecting the Download Data tab, where the zipped file will appear. (Note: You have only four days to download the data once it’s available; if you miss the window, you’ll have to request it again.)
This method makes sorting through all your videos a bit difficult because they’re shared as text-based links, rather than video files with thumbnails. It’s also unclear whether these linked videos will still be viewable once the app is down for U.S. users—you’re not getting the actual videos, and if the ByteDance servers shut down, you might lose your access. This data may not be comprehensive, either. For example, TikTok sent me a file of my comments but included only those I’d made since January, despite my having left comments on the app for years.
Either way, I’d argue that it’s an insightful exercise to request and review data collected by a major social media platform. From a privacy point of view, it can be unnerving to receive a text file showing every direct message you’ve sent or received, along with time stamps for all the impulse purchases you made on TikTok shop.
How to Save TikTok Collections
If you’re a TikTok enthusiast, you probably have hundreds—or, more likely, thousands—of videos saved and organized into collections within your account. If you follow CR’s TikTok, maybe you’ve saved some of our expert laundry tips or advice for first-time car buyers to refer back to later.
Archiving favorited videos en masse is more complicated and time-consuming than doing it one by one, and requires the use of a third-party app or browser extension. But it can be done.
For example, I downloaded the third-party iOS app Faves, which offers cloud-based storage for videos from other sites and social media platforms, all in one place. (It requires a subscription after the free trial; the price varies by storage amount.) After downloading and setting up the app, you simply open TikTok and go to one of your collections (make sure that it’s public), click the share arrow at the top right, and then click “More.” From there, select the Faves app and it will move over an entire collection of TikTok videos at once, which you can then view within the Faves app.
I also tried out the myfaveTT Chrome extension, which allows you to download all your saved TikToks directly to your computer. It’s not a perfect solution: The process takes a long time, the videos aren’t organized into your collections, and the extension failed for me after about 650 videos, potentially because of heavy network traffic. But it’s worth a shot. (By the way, CR didn’t evaluate the privacy or security practices of either Faves or myfaveTT.)
I’ve seen other creative strategies floating around, too—like pinning TikTok videos to a Pinterest board or screen recording videos on your phone. What makes the most sense to you likely depends on how many videos you need to save and whether you’re willing to spend money for a third-party app or additional storage.
Follow Your Favorite TikTokers on Other Platforms
Like many TikTok users, I’ve followed certain creators for years and want to keep up with them. I suggest scrolling through your follow list before the ban and finding your favorite accounts on their other platforms—whether that’s Instagram, YouTube, Substack, or even the increasingly popular Bluesky. Signing up for a content creator’s direct email list is also a useful way to stay connected—particularly as social media platforms continue to be in flux.
If you’re in a time crunch, you can quickly screenshot or screen record your follow list to reference later. And remember: If you downloaded all your TikTok data, you’ll receive a text file listing all the accounts that you follow.
If you’ve enjoyed CR’s TikTok account, you can find our expert consumer advice and recommendations on other platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as through our email newsletters.
