Watch history, likes, favourites, or your own posts?

“I lost a TikTok” is four different problems wearing the same sentence. And, curiously, the tools for each of them do not overlap at all.

So before you go looking, work out which one you have. The first three cases below run from hardest to easiest. The last one is a completely different problem – and it is exactly the one FindMyTok solves.

You watched it and did nothing

The hardest case. No like, no save, no comment: you just watched it and swiped on.

Your watch history is the only trail, and it is a long list with nothing to tell the items apart. Brazilian coverage from TecMundo and Canaltech walks through where it lives and how far back it goes.

Realistically, if you watched something three weeks ago and did not interact with it, the odds are not on your side. The lesson is the boring one everybody ignores: tap save.

You liked it

Better. Liked videos are their own list, documented here, and it is a much smaller haystack than your history.

It also has its own privacy setting, which is worth checking for a completely different reason: if your list is public, everything you have ever tapped a heart on is on your profile, for anyone to see. That is a job for a FixMyTok privacy audit, not for a search.

FixMyTok's dashboard with the total videos on the profile, how many are public and private, and the reposts still on the profile FixMyTok's dashboard with the total videos on the profile, how many are public and private, and the reposts still on the profile
FixMyTok's dashboard shows how many of your videos are public, how many are already private, and how many reposts are still on your profile.

You saved it

Favourites are the list you built on purpose, so this is the easiest case: go and look. Whether you find anything inside it depends on how many hundreds of things you have saved and whether you remember which collection you put it in.

You posted it

That is a completely different problem, and it is the one FindMyTok solves.

The video is yours, it is published, and it is somewhere in your own back catalogue. You are not trying to recover something that passed you by; you are trying to locate something you made and cannot find by date or by caption, because what you remember is a sentence you said out loud.

FindMyTok transcribes your own published videos on your iPhone and indexes them. Then you search by the phrase and get back the post and the second where you said it. If the words were written on screen rather than spoken, you can search for them too.

FindMyTok's Search screen with the Spoken, On screen and Both options, the date filter and a list of matches with timestamps FindMyTok's Search screen with the Spoken, On screen and Both options, the date filter and a list of matches with timestamps
In FindMyTok you search what was said, what appeared on screen, or both.

Details in find a TikTok by the words you remember saying.

The export covers some of this

TikTok’s data request produces a file that can include activity records, so if you are chasing something from further back than the app comfortably shows, it is worth requesting. It takes days to arrive, so start it now if there is any chance you will want it.

More on what is inside it in download your TikTok data and what you actually get.