There may still be some deus ex machina that saves TikTok — or at least puts things on hold — but for now, the social media app's impending ban has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
So what about all those videos you posted? It could be vacation vlogs, fierce reaction videos, or just fun memes, but you've probably worked hard and it would be a shame to lose them.
To be clear, under the terms of the ban, existing users can still use TikTok; you will not receive software updates. So if you want to download those videos for safekeeping, you don't necessarily have to get it done before Sunday. Then again, TikTok's lawyer told the court that things would go “dark” on Sunday if the ban wasn't lifted… No one knew what that meant.
You will be able to download any videos you have published to the platform. You can also download other creators' videos if they make their videos public and enable privacy settings that allow other users to download their clips. If you follow our steps below and do not look at the local save option, the creator may have restricted sharing permissions.
If you're a creator who wants to back up your own clips, or you just want to stock up on your all-time favorite TikTok videos, here's how to do it.
January 2025: This article was updated to reflect current information and details about downloading TikTok videos.
Save TikTok videos to your phone
For most people, TikTok is a completely mobile experience: They watch, create, and post videos entirely using their phone. If you're a mobile-first TikTok creator, the video you recorded is likely saved somewhere on your phone. But maybe you've changed phones or deleted local copies of those old videos to free up space. If your videos are only stored on TikTok's cloud, you can still download them all to your phone.
Downloading videos to your computer is a little easier than downloading them to your phone. There are some additional steps on mobile devices, so if you have dozens or even hundreds of videos to back up, you can follow the instructions listed below that explain how to download videos to your computer. your.
Here are instructions for iPhone and Android devices:
Go to any TikTok video. On your own video, tap the three dots in the bottom right corner of the screen. For other creators' videos available to download, tap the arrow-shaped Share button in the same area.
A series of gray icons will appear along the bottom of the screen. Click on the one with content Save Video.
A percentage counter will appear on the screen, indicating that the application is processing the video. This process usually happens so quickly that you might not even see it, but that depends on your connection speed.
Next, a series of sharing options will pop up. Scroll right and click the three dots. Here you can select the email option to send the file to yourself as an attachment or upload the file to a cloud service like Google Drive. There will be even more options based on your smartphone app. Look for any options that allow you to save videos locally.