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How to Recover Twitter Drafts

Recover Twitter Drafts

Twitter’s Draft feature is extremely useful, especially if your opinion is held in high regard or if you’re known for clever or funny remarks. Drafts are an alternative to jolting down notes on your phone – you can write, tweak, proofread, and, if you decide so, publish your Drafts from the Twitter website or app directly. As such, a common question is, “can I get my drafts back on Twitter?” The answer depends on things we’ll address right away, but if you meet the requirements, the chance of recovery is high. So, let’s jump straight into how to recover Twitter drafts.

Obstacles with Twitter drafts recovery

Here are 4 difficulties with recovering Twitter drafts:

1. I switched devices. Where do I find my Twitter drafts?

Because Twitter drafts are saved in the cache, they are device-exclusive and aren’t accessible cross-platform.

2. I forgot to save a tweet as a draft

If you exited out of the Twitter composer without saving, your draft is gone. Sorry!

3. I accidentally deleted all Twitter drafts. Help!

If you’re on iPhone, you can only use method 2 before attempting method 4. For website drafts, try method 1 before trying method 4. On Android, attempt methods 2 and 3 before relying on method 4.

4. I deactivated my Twitter account/logged out of the Twitter app/uninstalled the Twitter app

In all 3 cases, you’ll have to rely on the advice we gave above.

1. Recover Twitter drafts from the website

Even though the Draft feature was exclusive to the Twitter apps upon introduction, this is no longer true. Here’s how you can restore Twitter drafts from the web app:

  1. Open Twitter composer.
  2. In the top right corner, click on Unsent Tweets.
  3. Switch to the Drafts tab if Scheduled is selected.
  4. Click on any Draft tweet, and it will appear in the composer in full.
  5. If you don’t want to publish it, press X (desktop) or tap on Cancel (mobile) then select Save (desktop) or Save as Draft (mobile) to keep it in the Drafts folder.

2. Recover Twitter drafts from the app

Follow these steps to recover Twitter drafts on mobile:

  1. Open the Twitter app.
  2. Start writing a new tweet.
  3. Tap on Drafts in the upper right corner.
  4. Tip. If it doesn’t appear os is greyed out, your Drafts are gone. Refer to tips we gave in the beginning.
  5. Tap on any draft on the list, and it’ll appear in the Twitter composer. If you don’t want to make it public, follow step 5 above.

3. Twitter drafts recovery from internal storage (Android only)

The internal storage of Apple devices, especially iPhones and iPads, is notoriously hard to access without jailbreaking or third-party Mac apps. So, this technique will only work for Android devices. Here’s how recovering drafts from Twitter via internal storage works:

  1. Open a File Explorer app.
  2. Open the internal storage or SD card folder, depending on where you installed Twitter.
  3. Then, open folders in this order: data > data > com.twitter.android (might be called differently, but will have “Twitter” in the name) > databases.
  4. Now, if you’ve only used one Twitter account, the file might be called drafts.db. If you’ve had multiple users sign in, it’ll be titled [twitter-ID]-drafts.db.
  5. Tip. There are a plethora of online tools that display your Twitter ID after you enter your Twitter handle.
  6. You now have 3 options:
    1. Find an Android app that can read databases.
    2. Copy the file to PC or Mac, and use appropriate software to open the .db file.
    3. Copy the file anywhere else, reinstall the Twitter app, return it to the folder, launch the Twitter app, then follow method 2.

4. Recovering Twitter drafts: Last resort options

If none of the techniques above worked, it’s time to break a sweat. Here are 3 desperate attempts you can use:

1. Contact Twitter Support

We mentioned this option when we taught you how to recover a Twitter account. More precisely, you can use the Submit a Ticket page to reach out for help, but you’ll obviously have to select a different option.

2. Use the Twitter archive tool

Although drafts aren’t mentioned explicitly, if it’s an effective way to recover Twitter chats and tweets from the time you started your account, so why not drafts? Follow instructions under the headline Built-in tool.

3. Use third-party data recovery software

You can scour the cache on your mobile device for remnants of your Twitter drafts. We demonstrated how this works in method 3 of the Twitter chat recovery guide mentioned above. We recommend you try to open the drafts.db file again after you do this on Android.

How to Save and Prevent Future Twitter Draft Loss?

If you don’t know how to save a Twitter’s draft, you can take reference from the below steps:

  1. First, launch the Twitter app on your mobile phone.
  2. Now, you see a “+” icon on the bottom right, click on it. On iPads, it is on the left side.
  3. Four icons are displayed in front of you. You have to click on the feather icon stating “Tweet”.
  4. Thereafter, start typing your tweet.
  5. After this, follow step number 5, given in the above section, to save your draft by clicking here.

Above is the simplest method to save your Twitter draft. But there’s a bug in Twitter’s draft that even if you save it, most of the time it automatically got deleted.

How I prevent my draft loss?

The best way to prevent your Twitter draft from being lost is to keep it saved in an External Notes App. There are many reports across the internet of users’ drafts automatically disappearing, and Twitter has acknowledged this issue and suggested saving the drafts in an external notes app.

You can use: Google Keep, NOTEBOOK, and ColorNote Notepad Notes-like applications to save your Twitter drafts.

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