TikTok Users Are Losing Their Drafts, but What Explains This Frustrating Issue

Making TikTok videos can be a time-consuming and frustrating process, which is why the app has done everything that it can to make editing videos easy. Among those convenient features is the drafts folder, which gives users a chance to save their progress on a video and return to it later to publish.

Users sometimes find that their drafts have disappeared, though, which can be frustrating because it means replicating a bunch of work — or losing irreplaceable footage. Here's why the issue occurs, and whether you might be able to do anything to fix the problem.

If you've noticed that your TikTok drafts have vanished, the most common explanation is likely that you deleted the app from your phone. If you delete the app and then reinstall it, you'll find that all the drafts you had saved in your app have vanished. This happens because drafts are actually saved on your device instead of being linked to your account, which causes them to disappear along with the app itself.

Another common problem users have comes when the try to switch devices. If you edit videos on your phone, and then try to find them in your drafts folder on your tablet, for example, you may notice that they aren't there for the same reason.

TikTok tries to make sure that users are aware of this limitation, and even provides the warning: “Only you can see your drafts. Uninstalling TikTok will discard all drafts."

If for any reason you need to uninstall the app, you should take the time beforehand to make sure that your drafts are saved somewhere on an external device. Otherwise, you're going to lose all of your drafts anytime the app is removed from your phone, which is a situation that most regular TikTok creators definitely don't want to be in.

While it's unlikely that you'll be able to fully recover your drafts, your drafts may be somewhere on your phone or in the cloud. If you are really trying to avoid building videos again from scratch, you should thoroughly check your iCloud or other account, and also go through the storage settings on your phone to see if TikTok is saving videos somewhere on your device.

The easiest way to save drafts, though, is to make sure that you back them up in advance so that you know where they are and how you can access them in the event that they disappear. This may be a little extra work on the front end, but it definitely saves you a lot of time in the long run.