How to export your TikTok data (and get your Favorites out)

You want your TikTok data out: your videos, your comments, and above all the hundreds of recipes, workouts, and how-tos you tapped Favorite on. Maybe you're worried about a ban headline, maybe you're just tired of trusting an app to remember what you saved.

Here's the catch worth knowing up front: TikTok will hand you an export of your account, but your Favorites come back as a list of dates and links, and nothing else. No captions, no creator names, no thumbnails, and certainly no videos. This guide walks through the official download step by step, what's really inside the file, why the Favorites part is so thin, and how to turn that pile of links into content you'll still have next year.

The quick answer: how to export your TikTok data

TikTok's export tool is called Download your data, and it lives in the app's settings (you can also reach it from tiktok.com in a browser):

1. Open your profile, tap the menu (☰) in the top corner, then Settings and privacy.
2. Tap Account → Download your data.
3. On the Request data tab, choose what to include: All data or a Custom selection of categories. Pick All data unless you have a reason not to; a partial request silently leaves things out.
4. Choose the format: TXT if you just want to read it, JSON if you'll import it anywhere or run a script over it.
5. Tap Request data and wait. When the file is ready it appears on the Download data tab, and you download the ZIP from there.

TikTok says the file "may take a few days to prepare"; small or new accounts often get it much faster. One quirk worth knowing: TikTok warns that the last 24 to 48 hours of some activity may not make it into the file, so don't request it expecting yesterday's saves to be there.

What's actually inside the export

Open the file and it's a decent record of your activity. Depending on your account you'll find:

• Your activity as data: video browsing history, like list, comments, search history, share history, login history, followers and following.
• Your profile: bio, settings, and account info.
• Your direct messages: chat history as text.
• Your own videos: listed as links to each video you posted, not as video files.
• Your Favorites: favorite videos, songs, effects, and hashtags, each as its own dated list inside the Activity section.

Notice what's missing from that list: actual media. A TikTok export contains no video files at all, not even your own posts. It's a text record of an account, not a backup of its content. (TikTok doesn't formally document the export's file layout, so exact file names can shift between requests, but the shape above is what exports look like at the time of writing.)

The catch: your Favorites are links, not videos

The Favorites section is the one people come for, and it's the thinnest part of the whole export. Each favorited video is exactly two fields:

{
	"Date": "2025-11-03 18:42:11",
	"VideoLink": "https://www.tiktokv.com/share/video/7431552901234567890/"
}

That's the entire record. Compare that with what you actually saved:

• No caption, so you can't search for that pasta recipe by any word in it.
• No creator name, so you can't tell whose video it was.
• No thumbnail, so 400 favorites are 400 identical-looking links.
• No collection names. The folders you sorted your Favorites into don't exist in the export; everything is flattened into one chronological list.
• No video, obviously. The link points back at TikTok's servers.

It makes sense from TikTok's side: those videos belong to other creators, so the export records that you saved them, not the content itself. But the practical result is blunt: your Favorites export is a receipt, not a backup. To find out what any entry even is, you have to open the link, which only works while the original is still up.

Why even the links rot

You might think a list of links is good enough. It isn't, for two reasons that stack on top of each other.

First, the videos themselves vanish. A favorite is a pointer to content owned by someone else. The moment the creator deletes the video, switches to private, or gets banned, your exported link resolves to "Video currently unavailable". We went deep on this in the TikTok Favorites guide, and on the broader pattern in our guide to link rot.

Second, direct video URLs are booby-trapped. TikTok serves video from its CDN through signed URLs that expire quickly, typically within hours to a couple of days by third-party tooling reports. So even if you grab the raw video address while a favorite is still alive, that address stops working on a timer, while the video itself is still up. Only the share link survives, and the share link is exactly what dies when the video is removed.

Your TikTok backup options, side by side

Manually downloading each video works, and it's the only way to end up with the actual video files, but it's one video at a time through the share sheet, creators can disable downloads on their videos, and nobody does it for 400 favorites. Scrapers can enrich your export with captions and thumbnails, but they read the live page, so anything already deleted is invisible to them.

Stashr sits in the capture-first column: it doesn't store the raw video file, but it captures everything you need to find and recognize a favorite (caption, creator, cover image, link) the moment you save it, and that copy survives the original being deleted.

Turning the export into something useful

If you already have your export, here's the practical triage for the links in it:

1. Check what's still alive. Paste your favorite links into our dead link checker to see which videos still resolve before you spend effort on the ones that don't.
2. Archive the survivors. Push the live ones through the Wayback bulk submitter so the Internet Archive holds a snapshot of the page.
3. Keep the real keepers. For the handful you truly care about, open each one and use TikTok's own Save video (when the creator allows it) to get the file itself.

That works, and it's honest work. But look at what you're really doing: rebuilding, by hand and after the fact, the context TikTok never exported for you.

The way to never need an export again

The reason this whole exercise is fragile is that a TikTok favorite was never a copy, just a pointer. So flip the order: capture at save time.

That's what Stashr does. Its browser extension imports the Favorites your account still exposes and, from then on, captures every new favorite the moment you tap it: the caption, the creator, the cover image, and the link, all in your own library. Because each save is a real record instead of a bare URL:

• Deletion stops erasing your memory of it. The video can go private or get deleted tomorrow; you still know exactly what it was, who made it, and what it said.
• You can actually find things. Every save is AI-tagged on the way in, so you search in plain English instead of scrolling a wall of thumbnails:

stashr.search("that 15-minute high-protein pasta recipe");
// → returns the favorite, even after the original was deleted

And your TikTok Favorites land in the same library as your saved tweets, Reddit saves, and Instagram saved posts, so the next export you'll never need isn't just TikTok's.

Common questions

How do I download my TikTok data?

In the app: Profile → Menu (☰) → Settings and privacy → Account → Download your data. Choose All data and a format (TXT or JSON), then submit the request. When the file is ready, it appears on the Download data tab in the same place. The same flow exists on tiktok.com under Settings.

Does the TikTok export include my Favorites?

Yes, but only as a list. Each favorited video is a save date plus a link back to TikTok. Captions, creator names, thumbnails, collection folders, and the videos themselves are not included.

How long does a TikTok data request take?

TikTok says preparing the file may take a few days; small or new accounts often get it within hours. The finished file then stays available for up to 4 days; miss the window and you have to request it again.

Does the export contain my own videos?

Only as links. The export lists the videos you posted but does not include the video files. To keep your own content, download each video from its share menu, or save your originals outside TikTok.

Can I get back favorites that were already deleted?

No. If a video was deleted, set to private, or the creator's account is gone, neither the official export nor any third-party tool can retrieve it. The only way to keep a favorite through a deletion is to have captured it while the video was still live.